Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

Yixin Cao, Yang Feng, Deyi Xiong (Editors)


Anthology ID:
2024.acl-demos
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-demos
DOI:
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-demos.pdf

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Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Yixin Cao | Yang Feng | Deyi Xiong

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PAI-Diffusion: Constructing and Serving a Family of Open Chinese Diffusion Models for Text-to-image Synthesis on the Cloud
Chengyu Wang | Zhongjie Duan | Bingyan Liu | Xinyi Zou | Cen Chen | Kui Jia | Jun Huang

Text-to-image synthesis for the Chinese language poses unique challenges due to its large vocabulary size, and intricate character relationships. While existing diffusion models have shown promise in generating images from textual descriptions, they often neglect domain-specific contexts and lack robustness in handling the Chinese language. This paper introduces PAI-Diffusion, a comprehensive framework that addresses these limitations. PAI-Diffusion incorporates both general and domain-specific Chinese diffusion models, enabling the generation of contextually relevant images. It explores the potential of using LoRA and ControlNet for fine-grained image style transfer and image editing, empowering users with enhanced control over image generation. Moreover, PAI-Diffusion seamlessly integrates with Alibaba Cloud’s Platform for AI, providing accessible and scalable solutions. All the Chinese diffusion model checkpoints, LoRAs, and ControlNets, including domain-specific ones, are publicly available. A user-friendly Chinese WebUI and the diffusers-api elastic inference toolkit, also open-sourced, further facilitate the easy deployment of PAI-Diffusion models in various local and cloud environments, making it a valuable resource for Chinese text-to-image synthesis.

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OpenVNA: A Framework for Analyzing the Behavior of Multimodal Language Understanding System under Noisy Scenarios
Ziqi Yuan | Baozheng Zhang | Hua Xu | Zhiyun Liang | Kai Gao

We present OpenVNA, an open-source framework designed for analyzing the behavior of multimodal language understanding systems under noisy conditions. OpenVNA serves as an intuitive toolkit tailored for researchers, facilitating convenience batch-level robustness evaluation and on-the-fly instance-level demonstration. It primarily features a benchmark Python library for assessing global model robustness, offering high flexibility and extensibility, thereby enabling customization with user-defined noise types and models. Additionally, a GUI-based interface has been developed to intuitively analyze local model behavior. In this paper, we delineate the design principles and utilization of the created library and GUI-based web platform. Currently, OpenVNA is publicly accessible at https://github.com/thuiar/OpenVNA, with a demonstration video available at https://youtu.be/0Z9cW7RGct4.

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XNLP: An Interactive Demonstration System for Universal Structured NLP
Hao Fei | Meishan Zhang | Min Zhang | Tat-Seng Chua

Structured Natural Language Processing (XNLP) is an important subset of NLP that entails understanding the underlying semantic or syntactic structure of texts, which serves as a foundational component for many downstream applications. Despite certain recent efforts to explore universal solutions for specific categories of XNLP tasks, a comprehensive and effective approach for unifying all XNLP tasks long remains underdeveloped. Meanwhile, while XNLP demonstration systems are vital for researchers exploring various XNLP tasks, existing platforms can be limited to, e.g., supporting few XNLP tasks, lacking interactivity and universalness. To this end, we propose an advanced XNLP demonstration system, where we leverage LLM to achieve universal XNLP, with one model for all with high generalizability. Overall, our system advances in multiple aspects, including universal XNLP modeling, high performance, interpretability, scalability, and interactivity, offering a unified platform for exploring diverse XNLP tasks in the community.

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Towards the TopMost: A Topic Modeling System Toolkit
Xiaobao Wu | Fengjun Pan | Anh Tuan Luu

Topic models have a rich history with various applications and have recently been reinvigorated by neural topic modeling. However, these numerous topic models adopt totally distinct datasets, implementations, and evaluations. This impedes quick utilization and fair comparisons, and thereby hinders their research progress and applications. To tackle this challenge, we in this paper propose a Topic Modeling System Toolkit (TopMost). Compared to existing toolkits, TopMost stands out by supporting more extensive features. It covers a broader spectrum of topic modeling scenarios with their complete lifecycles, including datasets, preprocessing, models, training, and evaluations. Thanks to its highly cohesive and decoupled modular design, TopMost enables rapid utilization, fair comparisons, and flexible extensions of diverse cutting-edge topic models. Our code, tutorials, and documentation are available at https://github.com/bobxwu/topmost.

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Wordflow: Social Prompt Engineering for Large Language Models
Zijie Wang | Aishwarya Chakravarthy | David Munechika | Duen Horng Chau

Large language models (LLMs) require well-crafted prompts for effective use. Prompt engineering, the process of designing prompts, is challenging, particularly for non-experts who are less familiar with AI technologies. While researchers have proposed techniques and tools to assist LLM users in prompt design, these works primarily target AI application developers rather than non-experts. To address this research gap, we propose social prompt engineering, a novel paradigm that leverages social computing techniques to facilitate collaborative prompt design. To investigate social prompt engineering, we introduce Wordflow, an open-source and social text editor that enables everyday users to easily create, run, share, and discover LLM prompts. Additionally, by leveraging modern web technologies, Wordflow allows users to run LLMs locally and privately in their browsers. Two usage scenarios highlight how social prompt engineering and our tool can enhance laypeople’s interaction with LLMs. Wordflow is publicly accessible at https://poloclub.github.io/wordflow.

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LM Transparency Tool: Interactive Tool for Analyzing Transformer Language Models
Igor Tufanov | Karen Hambardzumyan | Javier Ferrando | Elena Voita

We present the LM Transparency Tool (LM-TT), an open-source interactive toolkit for analyzing the internal workings of Transformer-based language models. Differently from previously existing tools that focus on isolated parts of the decision-making process, our framework is designed to make the entire prediction process transparent, and allows tracing back model behavior from the top-layer representation to very fine-grained parts of the model. Specifically, it (i) shows the important part of the whole input-to-output information flow, (ii) allows attributing any changes done by a model block to individual attention heads and feed-forward neurons, (iii) allows interpreting the functions of those heads or neurons. A crucial part of this pipeline is showing the importance of specific model components at each step. As a result, we are able to look at the roles of model components only in cases where they are important for a prediction. Since knowing which components should be inspected is key for analyzing large models where the number of these components is extremely high, we believe our tool will greatly support the interpretability community both in research settings and in practical applications.

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EmpathyEar: An Open-source Avatar Multimodal Empathetic Chatbot
Hao Fei | Han Zhang | Bin Wang | Lizi Liao | Qian Liu | Erik Cambria

This paper introduces EmpathyEar, a pioneering open-source, avatar-based multimodal empathetic chatbot, to fill the gap in traditional text-only empathetic response generation (ERG) systems. Leveraging the advancements of a large language model, combined with multimodal encoders and generators, EmpathyEar supports user inputs in any combination of text, sound, and vision, and produces multimodal empathetic responses, offering users, not just textual responses but also digital avatars with talking faces and synchronized speeches. A series of emotion-aware instruction-tuning is performed for comprehensive emotional understanding and generation capabilities. In this way, EmpathyEar provides users with responses that achieve a deeper emotional resonance, closely emulating human-like empathy. The system paves the way for the next emotional intelligence, for which we open-source the code for public access.

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OpenWebAgent: An Open Toolkit to Enable Web Agents on Large Language Models
Iat Long Iong | Xiao Liu | Yuxuan Chen | Hanyu Lai | Shuntian Yao | Pengbo Shen | Hao Yu | Yuxiao Dong | Jie Tang

We introduce OpenWebAgent, an open toolkit designed to optimize web automation by integrating both large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs). This toolkit focuses on enhancing human-computer interactions on the web, simplifying complex tasks through an advanced HTML parser, a rapid action generation module, and an intuitive user interface. At the core of OpenWebAgent is an innovative web agent framework that uses a modular design to allow developers to seamlessly integrate a variety of models and tools to process web information and automate tasks on the web. This enables the development of powerful, task-oriented web agents, significantly enhancing user experience and operational efficiency on the web. The OpenWebAgent framework, Chrome plugin, and demo video are available at https://github.com/THUDM/OpenWebAgent/.

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EasyEdit: An Easy-to-use Knowledge Editing Framework for Large Language Models
Peng Wang | Ningyu Zhang | Bozhong Tian | Zekun Xi | Yunzhi Yao | Ziwen Xu | Mengru Wang | Shengyu Mao | Xiaohan Wang | Siyuan Cheng | Kangwei Liu | Yuansheng Ni | Guozhou Zheng | Huajun Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) usually suffer from knowledge cutoff or fallacy issues, which means they are unaware of unseen events or generate text with incorrect facts owing to outdated/noisy data. To this end, many knowledge editing approaches for LLMs have emerged – aiming to subtly inject/edit updated knowledge or adjust undesired behavior while minimizing the impact on unrelated inputs. Nevertheless, due to significant differences among various knowledge editing methods and the variations in task setups, there is no standard implementation framework available for the community, which hinders practitioners from applying knowledge editing to applications. To address these issues, we propose EasyEdit, an easy-to-use knowledge editing framework for LLMs. It supports various cutting-edge knowledge editing approaches and can be readily applied to many well-known LLMs such as T5, GPT-J, LlaMA, etc. Empirically, we report the knowledge editing results on LlaMA-2 with EasyEdit, demonstrating that knowledge editing surpasses traditional fine-tuning in terms of reliability and generalization. We have released the source code on GitHub, along with Google Colab tutorials and comprehensive documentation for beginners to get started. Besides, we present an online system for real-time knowledge editing, and a demo video.

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EasyInstruct: An Easy-to-use Instruction Processing Framework for Large Language Models
Yixin Ou | Ningyu Zhang | Honghao Gui | Ziwen Xu | Shuofei Qiao | Runnan Fang | Lei Li | Zhen Bi | Guozhou Zheng | Huajun Chen

In recent years, instruction tuning has gained increasing attention and emerged as a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). To construct high-quality instruction datasets, many instruction processing approaches have been proposed, aiming to achieve a delicate balance between data quantity and data quality. Nevertheless, due to inconsistencies that persist among various instruction processing methods, there is no standard open-source instruction processing implementation framework available for the community, which hinders practitioners from further developing and advancing. To facilitate instruction processing research and development, we present EasyInstruct, an easy-to-use instruction processing framework for LLMs, which modularizes instruction generation, selection, and prompting, while also considering their combination and interaction. EasyInstruct is publicly released and actively maintained at Github, along with an online demo app and a demo video for quick-start, calling for broader research centered on instruction data and synthetic data.

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BotEval: Facilitating Interactive Human Evaluation
Hyundong Cho | Thamme Gowda | Yuyang Huang | Zixun Lu | Tianli Tong | Jonathan May

Following the rapid progress in natural language processing (NLP) models, language models are applied to increasingly more complex interactive tasks such as negotiations and conversation moderations. Having human evaluators directly interact with these NLP models is essential for adequately evaluating the performance on such interactive tasks. We develop BotEval, an easily customizable, open-source, evaluation toolkit that focuses on enabling human-bot interactions as part of the evaluation process, as opposed to human evaluators making judgements for a static input. BotEval balances flexibility for customization and user-friendliness by providing templates for common use cases that span various degrees of complexity and built-in compatibility with popular crowdsourcing platforms.We showcase the numerous useful features of BotEval through a study that evaluates the performance of various chatbots on their effectiveness for conversational moderation and discuss how BotEval differs from other annotation tools.

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GenGO: ACL Paper Explorer with Semantic Features
Sotaro Takeshita | Simone Ponzetto | Kai Eckert

We present GenGO, a system for exploring papers published in ACL conferences. Paper data stored in our database is enriched with multi-aspect summaries, extracted named entities, a field of study label, and text embeddings by our data processing pipeline. These metadata are used in our web-based user interface to enable researchers to quickly find papers relevant to their interests, and grasp an overview of papers without reading full-text of papers. To make GenGO to be available online as long as possible, we design GenGO to be simple and efficient to reduce maintenance and financial costs. In addition, the modularity of our data processing pipeline lets developers easily extend it to add new features. We make our code available to foster open development and transparency: https://gengo.sotaro.io.

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NLP-KG: A System for Exploratory Search of Scientific Literature in Natural Language Processing
Tim Schopf | Florian Matthes

Scientific literature searches are often exploratory, whereby users are not yet familiar with a particular field or concept but are interested in learning more about it. However, existing systems for scientific literature search are typically tailored to keyword-based lookup searches, limiting the possibilities for exploration. We propose NLP-KG, a feature-rich system designed to support the exploration of research literature in unfamiliar natural language processing (NLP) fields. In addition to a semantic search, NLP-KG allows users to easily find survey papers that provide a quick introduction to a field of interest. Further, a Fields of Study hierarchy graph enables users to familiarize themselves with a field and its related areas. Finally, a chat interface allows users to ask questions about unfamiliar concepts or specific articles in NLP and obtain answers grounded in knowledge retrieved from scientific publications. Our system provides users with comprehensive exploration possibilities, supporting them in investigating the relationships between different fields, understanding unfamiliar concepts in NLP, and finding relevant research literature. Demo, video, and code are available at: https://github.com/NLP-Knowledge-Graph/NLP-KG-WebApp.

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LocalRQA: From Generating Data to Locally Training, Testing, and Deploying Retrieval-Augmented QA Systems
Xiao Yu | Yunan Lu | Zhou Yu

Retrieval-augmented question-answering systems combine retrieval techniques with large language models to provide answers that are more accurate and informative. Many existing toolkits allow users to quickly build such systems using off-the-shelf models, but they fall short in supporting researchers and developers to customize the *model training, testing, and deployment process*. We propose LocalRQA, an open-source toolkit that features a wide selection of model training algorithms, evaluation methods, and deployment tools curated from the latest research. As a showcase, we build QA systems using online documentation obtained from Databricks and Faire’s websites. We find 7B-models trained and deployed using LocalRQA reach a similar performance compared to using OpenAI’s text-ada-002 and GPT-4-turbo.

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JORA: JAX Tensor-Parallel LoRA Library for Retrieval Augmented Fine-Tuning
Anique Tahir | Lu Cheng | Huan Liu

The scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) for retrieval-based tasks, particularly in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), faces significant memory constraints, especially when fine-tuning extensive prompt sequences. Current open-source libraries support full-model inference and fine-tuning across multiple GPUs but fall short of accommodating the efficient parameter distribution required for retrieved context. Addressing this gap, we introduce a novel framework for PEFT-compatible fine-tuning of GPT models, leveraging distributed training. Our framework uniquely utilizes JAX’s just-in-time (JIT) compilation and tensor-sharding for efficient resource management, thereby enabling accelerated fine-tuning with reduced memory requirements. This advancement significantly improves the scalability and feasibility of fine-tuning LLMs for complex RAG applications, even on systems with limited GPU resources. Our experiments show more than 12x improvement in runtime compared to Hugging Face/DeepSpeed implementation with four GPUs while consuming less than half the VRAM per GPU.

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LinguaLinked: Distributed Large Language Model Inference on Mobile Devices
Junchen Zhao | Yurun Song | Simenl3@uci.edu Simenl3@uci.edu | Ian Harris | Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) locally on mobile devices presents a significant challenge due to their extensive memory requirements. In this paper, we introduce LinguaLinked, a system for decentralized, distributed LLM inference on mobile devices. LinguaLinked enables collaborative execution of the inference task across multiple trusted devices and ensures data privacy by processing information locally. LinguaLinked uses three key strategies. First, an optimized model assignment technique segments LLMs and uses linear optimization to align segments with each device�s capabilities. Second, an optimized data transmission mechanism ensures efficient and structured data flow between model segments while also maintaining the integrity of the original model structure. Finally, LinguaLinked incorporates a runtime load balancer that actively monitors and redistributes tasks among mobile devices to prevent bottlenecks, enhancing the system�s overall efficiency and responsiveness. We demonstrate that LinguaLinked facilitates efficient LLM inference while maintaining consistent throughput and minimal latency through extensive testing across various mobile devices, from high-end to low-end Android devices.

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IMGTB: A Framework for Machine-Generated Text Detection Benchmarking
Michal Spiegel | Dominik Macko

In the era of large language models generating high quality texts, it is a necessity to develop methods for detection of machine-generated text to avoid their harmful use or simply for annotation purposes. It is, however, also important to properly evaluate and compare such developed methods. Recently, a few benchmarks have been proposed for this purpose; however, integration of newest detection methods is rather challenging, since new methods appear each month and provide slightly different evaluation pipelines.In this paper, we present the IMGTB framework, which simplifies the benchmarking of machine-generated text detection methods by easy integration of custom (new) methods and evaluation datasets. In comparison to existing frameworks, it enables to objectively compare statistical metric-based zero-shot detectors with classification-based detectors and with differently fine-tuned detectors. Its configurability and flexibility makes research and development of new detection methods easier, especially their comparison to the existing state-of-the-art detectors. The default set of analyses, metrics and visualizations offered by the tool follows the established practices of machine-generated text detection benchmarking found in state-of-the-art literature.

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DrugWatch: A Comprehensive Multi-Source Data Visualisation Platform for Drug Safety Information
Artem Bobrov | Domantas Saltenis | Zhaoyue Sun | Gabriele Pergola | Yulan He

Drug safety research is crucial for maintaining public health, often requiring comprehensive data support. However, the resources currently available to the public are limited and fail to provide a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between drugs and their side effects. This paper introduces “DrugWatch”, an easy-to-use and interactive multi-source information visualisation platform for drug safety study. It allows users to understand common side effects of drugs and their statistical information, flexibly retrieve relevant medical reports, or annotate their own medical texts with our automated annotation tool. Supported by NLP technology and enriched with interactive visual components, we are committed to providing researchers and practitioners with a one-stop information analysis, retrieval, and annotation service. The demonstration video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTqDgxzETjw. We also deployed an online demonstration system at https://drugwatch.net/.

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OpenEval: Benchmarking Chinese LLMs across Capability, Alignment and Safety
Chuang Liu | Linhao Yu | Jiaxuan Li | Renren Jin | Yufei Huang | Ling Shi | Junhui Zhang | Xinmeng Ji | Tingting Cui | Liutao Liutao | Jinwang Song | Hongying Zan | Sun Li | Deyi Xiong

The rapid development of Chinese large language models (LLMs) poses big challenges for efficient LLM evaluation. While current initiatives have introduced new benchmarks or evaluation platforms for assessing Chinese LLMs, many of these focus primarily on capabilities, usually overlooking potential alignment and safety issues. To address this gap, we introduce OpenEval, an evaluation testbed that benchmarks Chinese LLMs across capability, alignment and safety. For capability assessment, we include 12 benchmark datasets to evaluate Chinese LLMs from 4 sub-dimensions: NLP tasks, disciplinary knowledge, commonsense reasoning and mathematical reasoning. For alignment assessment, OpenEval contains 7 datasets that examines the bias, offensiveness and illegalness in the outputs yielded by Chinese LLMs. To evaluate safety, especially anticipated risks (e.g., power-seeking, self-awareness) of advanced LLMs, we include 6 datasets. In addition to these benchmarks, we have implemented a phased public evaluation and benchmark update strategy to ensure that OpenEval is in line with the development of Chinese LLMs or even able to provide cutting-edge benchmark datasets to guide the development of Chinese LLMs. In our first public evaluation, we have tested a range of Chinese LLMs, spanning from 7B to 72B parameters, including both open-source and proprietary models. Evaluation results indicate that while Chinese LLMs have shown impressive performance in certain tasks, more attention should be directed towards broader aspects such as commonsense reasoning, alignment, and safety.

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AutoRE: Document-Level Relation Extraction with Large Language Models
Lilong Xue | Dan Zhang | Yuxiao Dong | Jie Tang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional abilities in comprehending and generating text, motivating numerous researchers to utilize them for Information Extraction (IE) purposes, including Relation Extraction (RE). Nonetheless, most existing methods are predominantly designed for Sentence-level Relation Extraction (SentRE) tasks, which typically encompass a restricted set of relations and triplet facts within a single sentence. Furthermore, certain approaches resort to treating relations as candidate choices integrated into prompt templates, leading to inefficient processing and suboptimal performance when tackling Document-Level Relation Extraction (DocRE) tasks, which entail handling multiple relations and triplet facts distributed across a given document, posing distinct challenges. To overcome these limitations, we introduce AutoRE, an end-to-end DocRE model that adopts a novel RE extraction paradigm named RHF (Relation-Head-Facts). Unlike existing approaches, AutoRE does not rely on the assumption of known relation options, making it more reflective of real-world scenarios. Additionally, we have developed an easily extensible RE framework using a Parameters Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) algorithm (QLoRA). Our experiments on the RE-DocRED dataset showcase AutoRE’s best performance, achieving state-of-the-art results, surpassing TAG by 10.03% and 9.03% respectively on the dev and test set. The code is available and the demonstration video is provided.

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LinkTransformer: A Unified Package for Record Linkage with Transformer Language Models
Abhishek Arora | Melissa Dell

Many computational analyses require linking information across noisy text datasets. While large language models (LLMs) offer significant promise, approximate string matching packages in popular statistical softwares such as R and Stata remain predominant in academic applications. These packages have simple interfaces and can be easily extended to a diversity of languages and settings, and for academic applications, ease-of-use and extensibility are essential. In contrast, packages for record linkage with LLMs require significant familiarity with deep learning frameworks and often focus on specialized applications of commercial value in English. The open-source package LinkTransformer aims to bridge this gap by providing an end-to-end software for performing record linkage and other data cleaning tasks with transformer LLMs, treating linkage as a text retrieval problem. At its core is an off-the-shelf toolkit for applying transformer models to record linkage. LinkTransformer contains a rich repository of pre-trained models for multiple languages and supports easy integration of any transformer language model from Hugging Face or OpenAI, providing the extensibility required for many scholarly applications. Its APIs also perform common data processing tasks, e.g., aggregation, noisy de-duplication, and translation-free cross-lingual linkage. LinkTransformer contains comprehensive tools for efficient model tuning, allowing for highly customized applications, and users can easily contribute their custom-trained models to its model hub to ensure reproducibility. Using a novel benchmark dataset geared towards academic applications, we show that LinkTransformer - with both custom models and Hugging Face or OpenAI models off-the-shelf - outperforms string matching by a wide margin. By combining transformer LMs with intuitive APIs, LinkTransformer aims to democratize these performance gains for those who lack familiarity with deep learning frameworks.

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DocPilot: Copilot for Automating PDF Edit Workflows in Documents
Puneet Mathur | Alexa Siu | Varun Manjunatha | Tong Sun

Digital documents, such as PDFs, are vital in business workflows, enabling communication, documentation, and collaboration. Handling PDFs can involve navigating complex workflows and numerous tools (e.g., comprehension, annotation, editing), which can be tedious and time-consuming for users. We introduce DocPilot, an AI-assisted document workflow Copilot system capable of understanding user intent and executing tasks accordingly to help users streamline their workflows. DocPilot undertakes intelligent orchestration of various tools through LLM prompting in four steps: (1) Task plan generation, (2) Task plan verification and self-correction, (3) Multi-turn User Feedback, and (4) Task Plan Execution via Code Generation and Error log-based Code Self-Revision. The primary goal of this system is to free the user from the intricacies of document editing, enabling them to focus on the creative aspects and enrich their document management experience.

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UltraEval: A Lightweight Platform for Flexible and Comprehensive Evaluation for LLMs
Chaoqun He | Renjie Luo | Shengding Hu | Ranchi Zhao | Jie Zhou | Hanghao Wu | Jiajie Zhang | Xu Han | Zhiyuan Liu | Maosong Sun

Evaluation is pivotal for honing Large Language Models (LLMs), pinpointing their capabilities and guiding enhancements. The rapid development of LLMs calls for a lightweight and easy-to-use framework for swift evaluation deployment. However, due to the various implementation details to consider, developing a comprehensive evaluation platform is never easy. Existing platforms are often complex and poorly modularized, hindering seamless incorporation into researcher’s workflows. This paper introduces UltraEval, a user-friendly evaluation framework characterized by lightweight, comprehensiveness, modularity, and efficiency. We identify and reimplement three core components of model evaluation (models, data, and metrics). The resulting composability allows for the free combination of different models, tasks, prompts, and metrics within a unified evaluation workflow. Additionally, UltraEval supports diverse models owing to a unified HTTP service and provides sufficient inference acceleration.

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PyFoma: a Python finite-state compiler module
Mans Hulden | Michael Ginn | Miikka Silfverberg | Michael Hammond

We describe PyFoma, an open-source Python module for constructing weighted and unweighted finite-state transducers and automata from regular expressions, string rewriting rules, right-linear grammars, or low-level state/transition manipulation. A large variety of standard algorithms for working with finite-state machines is included, with a particular focus on the needs of linguistic and NLP applications. The data structures and code in the module are designed for legibility to allow for potential use in teaching the theory and algorithms associated with finite-state machines.

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VeraCT Scan: Retrieval-Augmented Fake News Detection with Justifiable Reasoning
Cheng Niu | Yang Guan | Yuanhao Wu | Juno Zhu | Juntong Song | Randy Zhong | Kaihua Zhu | Siliang Xu | Shizhe Diao | Tong Zhang

The proliferation of fake news poses a significant threat not only by disseminating misleading information but also by undermining the very foundations of democracy. The recent advance of generative artificial intelligence has further exacerbated the challenge of distinguishing genuine news from fabricated stories. In response to this challenge, we introduce VeraCT Scan, a novel retrieval-augmented system for fake news detection. This system operates by extracting the core facts from a given piece of news and subsequently conducting an internet-wide search to identify corroborating or conflicting reports. Then sources’ credibility is leveraged for information verification. Besides determining the veracity of news, we also provide transparent evidence and reasoning to support its conclusions, resulting in the interpretability and trust in the results. In addition to GPT-4 Turbo, Llama-2 13B is also fine-tuned for news content understanding, information verification, and reasoning. Both implementations have demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracy in the realm of fake news detection.

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string2string: A Modern Python Library for String-to-String Algorithms
Mirac Suzgun | Stuart Shieber | Dan Jurafsky

We introduce **string2string**, an open-source library that offers a comprehensive suite of efficient algorithms for a broad range of string-to-string problems. It includes traditional algorithmic solutions as well as recent advanced neural approaches to tackle various problems in string alignment, distance measurement, lexical and semantic search, and similarity analysis�along with several helpful visualization tools and metrics to facilitate the interpretation and analysis of these methods. Notable algorithms featured in the library include the Smith-Waterman algorithm for pairwise local alignment, the Hirschberg algorithm for global alignment, the Wagner-Fischer algorithm for edit distance, BARTScore and BERTScore for similarity analysis, the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm for lexical search, and Faiss for semantic search. In addition, it wraps existing efficient and widely-used implementations of certain frameworks and metrics, such as sacreBLEU and ROUGE. Overall, the library aims to provide extensive coverage and increased flexibility in comparison to existing libraries for strings. It can be used for many downstream applications, tasks, and problems in natural-language processing, bioinformatics, and computational social sciences. It is implemented in Python, easily installable via pip, and accessible through a simple API. Source code, documentation, and tutorials are all available on our GitHub page: https://github.com/stanfordnlp/string2string* Documentation: https://string2string.readthedocs.io/en/latest/* GitHub page: https://github.com/stanfordnlp/string2string* Short video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IT-pBACDVUoEHewk__5Pz5mU5oAMq5k_/view?usp=sharing

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Proofread: Fixes All Errors with One Tap
Renjie Liu | Yanxiang Zhang | Yun Zhu | Haicheng Sun | Yuanbo Zhang | Michael Huang | Shanqing Cai | Lei Meng | Shumin Zhai

The impressive capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a powerful approach to reimagine users’ typing experience. This paper demonstrates the Proofread feature in Gboard, a virtual keyboard running on mobile phones. Proofread enables seamless sentence-level and paragraph-level corrections with a single tap. We describe the complete system in this paper, from data generation, metrics design to model tuning and deployment. To obtain models with sufficient quality, we implement a careful data synthetic pipeline tailored to online use cases, design multifaceted metrics, employ a two-stage tuning approach to acquire the dedicated LLM for the feature: the Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) for foundational quality, followed by the Reinforcement Learning (RL) tuning approach for targeted refinement. Specifically, we find sequential tuning on Rewrite and proofread tasks yields the best quality in SFT stage, and propose global and direct rewards in the RL tuning stage to seek further improvement. Extensive experiments on a human-labeled golden set showed our tuned PaLM2-XS model achieved 85.56% good ratio. We launched the feature to Pixel 8 devices by serving the model on TPU v5 in Google Cloud, with thousands of daily active users. Serving latency was significantly reduced by quantization, bucket inference, text segmentation, and speculative decoding. Our demo could be seen in Youtube.

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SeaLLMs - Large Language Models for Southeast Asia
Xuan-Phi Nguyen | Wenxuan Zhang | Xin Li | Mahani Aljunied | Zhiqiang Hu | Chenhui Shen | Yew Ken Chia | Xingxuan Li | Jianyu Wang | Qingyu Tan | Liying Cheng | Guanzheng Chen | Yue Deng | Sen Yang | Chaoqun Liu | Hang Zhang | Lidong Bing

Despite the remarkable achievements of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, there remains a linguistic bias that favors high-resource languages, such as English, often at the expense of low-resource and regional languages. To address this imbalance, we introduce SeaLLMs, an innovative series of language models that specifically focuses on Southeast Asian (SEA) languages. SeaLLMs are built upon popular English-centric models through continued pre-training with an extended vocabulary, specialized instruction and alignment tuning to better capture the intricacies of regional languages. This allows them to respect and reflect local cultural norms, customs, stylistic preferences, and legal considerations. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that SeaLLM models exhibit superior performance across a wide spectrum of linguistic tasks and assistant-style instruction-following capabilities relative to comparable open-source models. Moreover, they outperform ChatGPT-3.5 in non-Latin languages, such as Thai, Khmer, Lao, and Burmese, by large margins while remaining lightweight and cost-effective to operate.

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Fundus: A Simple-to-Use News Scraper Optimized for High Quality Extractions
Max Dallabetta | Conrad Dobberstein | Adrian Breiding | Alan Akbik

This paper introduces Fundus, a user-friendly news scraper that enables users to obtain millions of high-quality news articles with just a few lines of code. Unlike existing news scrapers, we use manually crafted, bespoke content extractors that are specifically tailored to the formatting guidelines of each supported online newspaper. This allows us to optimize our scraping for quality such that retrieved news articles are textually complete and without HTML artifacts. Further, our framework combines both crawling (retrieving HTML from the web or large web archives) and content extraction into a single pipeline. By providing a unified interface for a predefined collection of newspapers, we aim to make Fundus broadly usable even for non-technical users. This paper gives an overview of the framework, discusses our design choices, and presents a comparative evaluation against other popular news scrapers. Our evaluation shows that Fundus yields significantly higher quality extractions (complete and artifact-free news articles) than prior work.The framework is available on GitHub under https://github.com/flairNLP/fundus and can be simply installed using pip.

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CharPoet: A Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System Based on Token-free LLM
Chengyue Yu | Lei Zang | Jiaotuan Wang | Chenyi Zhuang | Jinjie Gu

Automatic Chinese classical poetry generation has attracted much research interest, but achieving effective control over format and content simultaneously remains challenging. Traditional systems usually accept keywords as user inputs, resulting in limited control over content. Large language models (LLMs) improve content control by allowing unrestricted user instructions, but the token-by-token generation process frequently makes format errors. Motivated by this, we propose CharPoet, a Chinese classical poetry generation system based on token-free LLM, which provides effective control over both format and content. Our token-free architecture generates in a character-by-character manner, enabling precise control over the number of characters. Pruned from existing token-based LLMs, CharPoet inherits their pretrained capabilities and can generate poetry following instructions like �Write me a poem for my mother’s birthday.� CharPoet achieves format accuracy above 0.96, outperforming Jiuge-GPT-2 (0.91) and GPT-4 (0.38). In terms of content quality, CharPoet surpasses traditional systems including Jiuge, and is comparable to other LLMs. Our system is open source and available at https://modelscope.cn/models/CharPoet/CharPoet. A video demonstration of CharPoet is available at https://youtu.be/voZ25qEp3Dc.

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ITAKE: Interactive Unstructured Text Annotation and Knowledge Extraction System with LLMs and ModelOps
Jiahe Song | Hongxin Ding | Zhiyuan Wang | Yongxin Xu | Yasha Wang | Junfeng Zhao

Extracting structured knowledge from unstructured text data has a wide range of application prospects, and a pervasive trend is to develop text annotation tools to help extraction. However, they often encounter issues such as single scenario usage, lack of effective human-machine collaboration, insufficient model supervision, and suboptimal utilization of Large Language Models (LLMs). We introduces an interactive unstructured text annotation and knowledge extraction system that synergistically integrates LLMs and ModelOps to alleviate these issues. The system leverages LLMs for enhanced performance in low-resource contexts, employs a ModelOps platform to monitor models throughout their lifecycle, and amalgamates interactive annotation methods with online machine learning and active learning. The demo video and website are now publicly available.

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LEGENT: Open Platform for Embodied Agents
Zhili Cheng | Zhitong Wang | Jinyi Hu | Shengding Hu | An Liu | Yuge Tu | Pengkai Li | Lei Shi | Zhiyuan Liu | Maosong Sun

Despite advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), their integration into language-grounded, human-like embodied agents remains incomplete, hindering complex real-life task performance in 3D environments. Existing integrations often feature limited open-sourcing, challenging collective progress in this field. We introduce LEGENT, an open, scalable platform for developing embodied agents using LLMs and LMMs. LEGENT offers a dual approach: a rich 3D environment with interactive, communicable, and actionable agents, paired with a user-friendly interface, and a sophisticated data generation pipeline utilizing advanced algorithms to exploit supervision from simulated worlds at scale. In our experiments, an embryonic vision-language-action model trained on LEGENT-generated data surpasses GPT-4V in embodied tasks, showcasing promising generalization capabilities. The demo video is available at the following link https://video.legent.ai.

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Variationist: Exploring Multifaceted Variation and Bias in Written Language Data
Alan Ramponi | Camilla Casula | Stefano Menini

Exploring and understanding language data is a fundamental stage in all areas dealing with human language. It allows NLP practitioners to uncover quality concerns and harmful biases in data before training, and helps linguists and social scientists to gain insight into language use and human behavior. Yet, there is currently a lack of a unified, customizable tool to seamlessly inspect and visualize language variation and bias across multiple variables, language units, and diverse metrics that go beyond descriptive statistics. In this paper, we introduce Variationist, a highly-modular, extensible, and task-agnostic tool that fills this gap. Variationist handles at once a potentially unlimited combination of variable types and semantics across diversity and association metrics with regards to the language unit of choice, and orchestrates the creation of up to five-dimensional interactive charts for over 30 variable type-semantics combinations. Through our case studies on computational dialectology, human label variation, and text generation, we show how Variationist enables researchers from different disciplines to effortlessly answer specific research questions or unveil undesired associations in language data. A Python library, code, documentation, and tutorials are made publicly available to the research community.

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An LLM-based Knowledge Synthesis and Scientific Reasoning Framework for Biomedical Discovery
Oskar Wysocki | Magdalena.wysocka@cruk.manchester.ac.uk Magdalena.wysocka@cruk.manchester.ac.uk | Danilo Carvalho | Alex Bogatu | Danilo.miranda@idiap.ch Danilo.miranda@idiap.ch | Maxime.delmas@idiap.ch Maxime.delmas@idiap.ch | Harriet.unsworth@cruk.manchester.ac.uk Harriet.unsworth@cruk.manchester.ac.uk | Andre Freitas

We present BioLunar, developed using the Lunar framework, as a tool for supporting biological analyses, with a particular emphasis on molecular-level evidence enrichment for biomarker discovery in oncology. The platform integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) to facilitate complex scientific reasoning across distributed evidence spaces, enhancing the capability for harmonizing and reasoning over heterogeneous data sources. Demonstrating its utility in cancer research, BioLunar leverages modular design, reusable data access and data analysis components, and a low-code user interface, enabling researchers of all programming levels to construct LLM-enabled scientific workflows. By facilitating automatic scientific discovery and inference from heterogeneous evidence, BioLunar exemplifies the potential of the integration between LLMs, specialised databases and biomedical tools to support expert-level knowledge synthesis and discovery.

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CogMG: Collaborative Augmentation Between Large Language Model and Knowledge Graph
Tong Zhou | Yubo Chen | Kang Liu | Jun Zhao

Large language models have become integral to question-answering applications despite their propensity for generating hallucinations and factually inaccurate content. Querying knowledge graphs to reduce hallucinations in LLM meets the challenge of incomplete knowledge coverage in knowledge graphs. On the other hand, updating knowledge graphs by information extraction and knowledge graph completion faces the knowledge update misalignment issue. In this work, we introduce a collaborative augmentation framework, CogMG, leveraging knowledge graphs to address the limitations of LLMs in QA scenarios, explicitly targeting the problems of incomplete knowledge coverage and knowledge update misalignment. The LLMs identify and decompose required knowledge triples that are not present in the KG, enriching them and aligning updates with real-world demands. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach through a supervised fine-tuned LLM within an agent framework, showing significant improvements in reducing hallucinations and enhancing factual accuracy in QA responses. Our code and video are publicly available.

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ELLA: Empowering LLMs for Interpretable, Accurate and Informative Legal Advice
Yutong Hu | Kangcheng Luo | Yansong Feng

Despite remarkable performance in legal consultation exhibited by legal Large Language Models(LLMs) combined with legal article retrieval components, there are still cases when the advice given is incorrect or baseless. To alleviate these problems, we propose ELLA, a tool for Empowering LLMs for interpretable, accurate, and informative Legal Advice. ELLA visually presents the correlation between legal articles and LLM’s response by calculating their similarities, providing users with an intuitive legal basis for the responses. Besides, based on the users’ queries, ELLA retrieves relevant legal articles and displays them to users. Users can interactively select legal articles for LLM to generate more accurate responses. ELLA also retrieves relevant legal cases for user reference. Our user study shows that presenting the legal basis for the response helps users understand better. The accuracy of LLM’s responses also improves when users intervene in selecting legal articles for LLM. Providing relevant legal cases also aids individuals in obtaining comprehensive information. Our github repo is: https://github.com/Huyt00/ELLA.

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LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models
Tianyi Tang | Hu Yiwen | Bingqian Li | Wenyang Luo | ZiJing Qin | Haoxiang Sun | Jiapeng Wang | Shiyi Xu | Xiaoxue Cheng | Geyang Guo | Han Peng | Bowen Zheng | Yiru Tang | Yingqian Min | Yushuo Chen | Jie Chen | Ranchi Zhao | Luran Ding | Yuhao Wang | Zican Dong | Xia Chunxuan | Junyi Li | Kun Zhou | Xin Zhao | Ji-Rong Wen

To facilitate the research on large language models (LLMs), this paper presents a comprehensive and unified library, LLMBox, to ease the development, use, and evaluation of LLMs. This library is featured with three main merits: (1) a unified data interface that supports the flexible implementation of various training strategies, (2) a comprehensive evaluation that covers extensive tasks, datasets, and models, and (3) more practical consideration, especially on user-friendliness and efficiency. With our library, users can easily reproduce existing methods, train new models, and conduct comprehensive performance comparisons. To rigorously test LLMBox, we conduct extensive experiments in a diverse coverage of evaluation settings, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our library in supporting various implementations related to LLMs. The detailed introduction and usage guidance can be found at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LLMBox.

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LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models
Yaowei Zheng | Richong Zhang | Junhao Zhang | YeYanhan YeYanhan | Zheyan Luo

Efficient fine-tuning is vital for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. However, it requires non-trivial efforts to implement these methods on different models. We present LlamaFactory, a unified framework that integrates a suite of cutting-edge efficient training methods. It provides a solution for flexibly customizing the fine-tuning of 100+ LLMs without the need for coding through the built-in web UI LlamaBoard. We empirically validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our framework on language modeling and text generation tasks. It has been released at https://github.com/hiyouga/LLaMA-Factory and received over 25,000 stars and 3,000 forks.