Thailand

Spoken Named Entity Recognition (NER) aims to extract entities from speech. 
The extracted entities can help voice assistants better understand user&#39;s questions and instructions.
However, current Chinese Spoken NER datasets are laboratory-controlled data that are collected by reading existing texts in quiet environments, rather than natural spoken data, and the texts used for reading are also limited in topics. 
These limitations obstruct the development of Spoken NER in more natural and common real-world scenarios.
To address this gap, we introduce a 
real-world Chinese Spoken NER dataset (RWCS-NER), encompassing open-domain daily conversations and task-oriented intelligent cockpit instructions. 
We compare several mainstream pipeline approaches on RWCS-NER. The results indicate that the current methods, affected by Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) errors, do not perform satisfactorily in real settings.
Aiming to enhance Spoken NER in real-world scenarios, we propose two approaches: self-training-asr and mapping then distilling (MDistilling).
Experiments show that both approaches can achieve significant improvements, particularly MDistilling.
Even compared with GPT4.0, MDistilling still reaches better results.
We believe that our work will advance the field of Spoken NER in real-world settings.

ACL 2024

Chinese Spoken Named Entity Recognition in Real-world Scenarios: Dataset and Approaches

robust methods to asr errors

real-world spoken named entity recognition

data resources

spoken language understanding

Spoken Named Entity Recognition (NER) aims to extract entities from speech. 
The extracted entities can help voice assistants better understand user's questions and instructions.
However, current Chinese Spoken NER datasets are laboratory-controlled data that are collected by reading existing texts in quiet environments, rather than natural spoken data, and the texts used for reading are also limited in topics. 
These limitations obstruct the development of Spoken NER in more natural and common real-world scenarios.
To address this gap, we introduce a 
real-world Chinese Spoken NER dataset (RWCS-NER), encompassing open-domain daily conversations and task-oriented intelligent cockpit instructions. 
We compare several mainstream pipeline approaches on RWCS-NER. The results indicate that the current methods, affected by Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) errors, do not perform satisfactorily in real settings.
Aiming to enhance Spoken NER in real-world scenarios, we propose two approaches: self-training-asr and mapping then distilling (MDistilling).
Experiments show that both approaches can achieve significant improvements, particularly MDistilling.
Even compared with GPT4.0, MDistilling still reaches better results.
We believe that our work will advance the field of Spoken NER in real-world settings.

poster

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Despite it being the cornerstone of BPE, the most common tokenization algorithm, the importance of compression in the tokenization process is still unclear. In this paper, we argue for the theoretical importance of compression, that can be viewed as 0-gram language modeling where equal probability is assigned to all tokens. We also demonstrate the empirical importance of compression for downstream success of pre-trained language models. We control the compression ability of several BPE tokenizers by varying the amount of documents available during their training: from 1 million documents to a character-based tokenizer equivalent to no training data at all. We then pre-train English language models based on those tokenizers and fine-tune them over several tasks. We show that there is a correlation between tokenizers' compression and models' downstream performance, suggesting that compression is a reliable intrinsic indicator of tokenization quality. These correlations are more pronounced for generation tasks (over classification) or for smaller models (over large ones). We replicated a representative part of our experiments on Turkish and found similar results, confirming that our results hold for languages with typological characteristics dissimilar to English. We conclude that building better compressing tokenizers is a fruitful avenue for further research and for improving overall model performance.

Unpacking Tokenization: Evaluating Text Compression and its Correlation with Model Performance

Byte Pair Encoding is an effective approach in machine translation across several languages. However, our analysis indicates that BPE is prone to over-segmentation in the morphologically rich language, Korean, which can erode word semantics and lead to semantic confusion during training. This semantic confusion, stemming from over-segmentation, ultimately contributes to a degradation of overall translation quality. To address this issue, we introduce Length-aware Subword Vocabulary Construction (LeVoC), a novel approach strategically incorporating longer words into the vocabulary. By utilizing an external monolingual Korean corpus, LeVoC extracts and integrates long words, effectively preserving morphological information and reducing semantic confusion. Our experiments demonstrate that LeVoC not only significantly outperforms BPE, but also can be applied to and surpass current state-of-the-art morpheme-aware subword tokenization methods. We provide evidence that the difficulty in translating sentences with long words in Korean is associated with morphological compositionality, and LeVoC's ability to reduce semantic confusion during training leads to improved translation quality.

Length-aware Byte Pair Encoding for Mitigating Over-segmentation in Korean Machine Translation

Long-form generations from large language models (LLMs) contain a mix of factual and non-factual claims, making evaluating factuality difficult.
Prior works evaluate the factuality of a long paragraph by decomposing it into multiple facts, verifying those facts independently, and aggregating the results.
Such methods assume that combining factual claims forms a factual paragraph.
The above assumption can be violated: we show that strong open-source models like Llama-chat can generate paragraphs that contain verifiable facts, but the facts are combined into a non-factual paragraph due to entity ambiguity.
We further reveal that existing factuality metrics, including FActScore and citation recall, cannot properly evaluate these non-factual paragraphs and overestimate their factuality.
To address this, we introduce an enhanced metric, **D-FActScore**, specifically designed for content with ambiguous entities.
We evaluate the D-FActScores of people biographies generated by retrieval-augmented LLMs.
We show that D-FActScore can better assess the factuality of paragraphs with entity ambiguity than FActScore.
We also find that four widely used open-source LLMs tend to mix information of distinct entities to form non-factual paragraphs, making their D-FActScore much lower than FActScore by over 10%.

Merging Facts, Crafting Fallacies: Evaluating the Contradictory Nature of Aggregated Factual Claims in Long-Form Generations

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities when prompted to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations alongside answers. However, previous research on evaluating LLMs has solely focused on answer accuracy, neglecting the correctness of the generated CoT. In this paper, we delve deeper into the CoT reasoning capabilities of LLMs in multi-hop question answering by utilizing knowledge graphs (KGs). We propose a novel discriminative and generative CoT evaluation paradigm to assess LLMs' knowledge of reasoning and the accuracy of the generated CoT. Through experiments conducted on 5 different families of LLMs across 2 multi-hop question-answering datasets, we find that LLMs possess sufficient knowledge to perform reasoning. However, there exists a significant disparity between answer accuracy and faithfulness of the CoT generated by LLMs, indicating that they often arrive at correct answers through incorrect reasoning.

Direct Evaluation of Chain-of-Thought in Multi-hop Reasoning with Knowledge Graphs

Revealing the syntactic structure of sentences in Chinese poses significant challenges for word-level parsers due to the absence of clear word boundaries. To facilitate a transition from word-level to character-level Chinese dependency parsing, this paper proposes modeling latent internal structures within words. In this way, each word-level dependency tree is interpreted as a forest of character-level trees. A constrained Eisner algorithm is implemented to ensure the compatibility of character-level trees, guaranteeing a single root for intra-word structures and establishing inter-word dependencies between these roots. Experiments on Chinese treebanks demonstrate the superiority of our method over both the pipeline framework and previous joint models. A detailed analysis reveals that a coarse-to-fine parsing strategy empowers the model to predict more linguistically plausible intra-word structures.

Character-Level Chinese Dependency Parsing via Modeling Latent Intra-Word Structure

Benchmark plays a pivotal role in assessing the advancements of large language models (LLMs). While numerous benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate LLMs' capabilities, there is a notable absence of a dedicated benchmark for assessing their musical abilities. To address this gap, we present ZIQI-Eval, a comprehensive and large-scale music benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the music-related capabilities of LLMs.
ZIQI-Eval encompasses a wide range of questions, covering 10 major categories and 56 subcategories, resulting in over 14,000 meticulously curated data entries. By leveraging ZIQI-Eval, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation over 16 LLMs to evaluate and analyze LLMs' performance in the domain of music.
Results indicate that all LLMs perform poorly on the ZIQI-Eval benchmark, suggesting significant room for improvement in their musical capabilities.
With ZIQI-Eval, we aim to provide a standardized and robust evaluation framework that facilitates a comprehensive assessment of LLMs' music-related abilities. The dataset is available at GitHub and HuggingFace.

The Music Maestro or The Musically Challenged, A Massive Music Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

A Large Language Model (LLM) tends to generate inconsistent and sometimes contradictory outputs when presented with a prompt that has equivalent semantics but is expressed differently from the original prompt. To achieve semantic consistency of an LLM, one of the key approaches is to finetune the model with prompt-output pairs with semantically equivalent meanings. Despite its effectiveness, a data-driven finetuning method incurs substantial computation costs in data preparation and model optimization. In this regime, an LLM is treated as a ``black box'', restricting our ability to gain deeper insights into its internal mechanism. In this paper, we are motivated to enhance the semantic consistency of LLMs through a more interpretable method (i.e., model editing) to this end. We first identify the model components (i.e., attention heads) that have a key impact on the semantic consistency of an LLM. We subsequently inject biases into the output of these model components along the semantic-consistency activation direction. It is noteworthy that these modifications are cost-effective, without reliance on mass manipulations of the original model parameters. Through comprehensive experiments on the constructed NLU and open-source NLG datasets, our method demonstrates significant improvements in the semantic consistency and task performance of LLMs. Additionally, our method exhibits promising generalization capabilities by performing well on tasks beyond the primary tasks.

Enhancing Semantic Consistency of Large Language Models through Model Editing: An Interpretability-Oriented Approach

In embodied instruction-following (EIF), the integration of pretrained language models (LMs) as task planners emerges as a significant branch, where tasks are planned at the skill level by prompting LMs with pretrained skills and user instructions. However, grounding these pretrained skills in different domains remains challenging due to their intricate entanglement with the domain-specific knowledge. To address this challenge, we present a semantic skill grounding (SemGro) framework that leverages the hierarchical nature of semantic skills. SemGro recognizes the broad spectrum of these skills, ranging from short-horizon low-semantic skills that are universally applicable across domains to long-horizon rich-semantic skills that are highly specialized and tailored for particular domains. The framework employs an iterative skill decomposition approach, starting from the higher levels of semantic skill hierarchy and then moving downwards, so as to ground each planned skill to an executable level within the target domain. To do so, we use the reasoning capabilities of LMs for composing and decomposing semantic skills, as well as their multi-modal extension for assessing the skill feasibility in the target domain. Our experiments in the VirtualHome benchmark show the efficacy of SemGro in 300 cross-domain EIF scenarios.

Semantic Skill Grounding for Embodied Instruction-Following in Cross-Domain Environments

Humans use multiple senses to comprehend the environment. Vision and language are two of the most vital senses since they allow us to easily communicate our thoughts and perceive the world around us. There has been a lot of interest in creating video-language understanding systems with human-like senses since a video-language pair can mimic both our linguistic medium and visual environment with temporal dynamics. In this survey, we review the key tasks of these systems and highlight the associated challenges. Based on the challenges, we summarize their methods from model architecture, model training, and data perspectives. We also conduct performance comparison among the methods, and discuss promising directions for future research.

Video-Language Understanding: A Survey from Model Architecture, Model Training, and Data Perspectives

Aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) has garnered significant attention in aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). Current ASQP research primarily relies on pre-trained generative language models to produce templated sequences, often complemented by grid-based auxiliary methods. Despite these efforts, the persistent challenge of generation instability remains unresolved and the effectiveness of grid methods remains underexplored in current studies. To this end, we introduce \textbf{G}rid Noise \textbf{D}iffusion \textbf{P}inpoint Network (\textbf{GDP}), a T5-based generative model aiming to tackle the issue of generation instability. The model consists of three novel modules, including Diffusion Vague Learning (DVL) to facilitate effective model learning and enhance overall robustness; Consistency Likelihood Learning (CLL) to discern the characteristics and commonalities of sentiment elements and thus reduce the impact of distributed noise; and GDP-FOR, a novel generation template, to enable models to generate outputs in a more natural way. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of our approach in addressing ASQP tasks.\footnote{Code for our method is available at : \url{https://github.com/ch11en/GDP_}}

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Chinese Spoken Named Entity Recognition in Real-world Scenarios: Dataset and Approaches

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