Thailand

ACL 2024

Engineering Conversational Search Systems: A Review of Applications, Architectures, and Functional Components

conversational search

dialogue systems

information retrieval

workshop paper

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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. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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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.

Although humans inherently have diverse values, current large language model (LLM) alignment methods often assume that aligning LLMs with the general public’s preferences is optimal. A major challenge in adopting a more individualized approach to LLM alignment is scalability, as it involves repeatedly acquiring preference data and training new reward models and LLMs for each individual’s preferences. To address these challenges, we propose a new paradigm where users specify what they value most within the system messages steering the LLM’s generation behavior to better align with the user's intentions. However, a naive adaptation of such an approach is non-trivial since LLMs are typically trained on a uniform system messages (e.g., "You are a helpful assistant") which limits their ability to generalize to diverse, unseen system messages. To improve this generalization, we create the Multifaceted Collection, a preference dataset with 192k combinations of values beyond generic helpfulness and harmlessness, spanning 65k user instructions. Using this dataset, we train a 7B LLM called Janus and test it on 921 prompts from 5 benchmarks (AlpacaEval 2.0, FLASK, Koala, MT-Bench, and Self-Instruct) by adding various unseen system messages that reflect user preferences. Janus demonstrates performance that is as good as or better than Mistral 7B Instruct v0.2, GPT-3.5 Turbo, and GPT-4, 75.2%, 72.4%, and 66.4% of the time, respectively. Unexpectedly, on three benchmarks focused on response helpfulness (AlpacaEval 2.0, MT-Bench, Arena Hard Auto v0.1), Janus also outperforms LLaMA 3 8B Instruct by a +4.0%, +0.1%, +3.0% margin, underscoring that training with a vast array of system messages could also enhance alignment to the general public's preference as well. Our code, dataset, benchmark, and models are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/janus.

Aligning to Thousands of Preferences via System Message Generalization

Names carry important information about our identities and demographics such as gender, nationality, ethnicity, etc. We investigate the use of individual's name, in both Arabic and English, to predict important attributes, namely country, region, gender, and language. We extract data from Wikidata, and normalize it, to build a comprehensive dataset consisting of more than 1 million entities and their normalized attributes. We experiment with a Linear SVM approach, as well as two Transformers approaches consisting of BERT model fine-tuning and Transformers pipeline. Our results indicate that we can predict the gender, language and region using the name only with a confidence over 0.65. The country attribute can be predicted with less accuracy. The Linear SVM approach outperforms the other approaches for all the attributes. The best performing approach was also evaluated on another dataset that consists of 1,500 names from 15 countries (covering different regions) extracted from Twitter, and yields similar results.

Wikidata as a Source of Demographic Information

The increasing use of artificial intelligence in healthcare requires robust datasets for training and validation, particularly in the domain of medical conversations. However, the creation and accessibility of such datasets in Arabic face significant challenges, especially due to the sensitivity and privacy concerns that are associated with medical conversations. These conversations are rarely recorded or preserved, making the availability of comprehensive Arabic medical dialogue datasets scarce. This limitation slows down not only the development of effective natural language processing models but also restricts the opportunity for open comparison of algorithms and their outcomes. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, GPT-4, Gemini-pro, and Claude-3 show promising capabilities in generating synthetic data. To address this gap, we introduce a novel Multi-Agent LLM approach capable of generating synthetic Arabic medical dialogues from patient notes, regardless of the original language. This development presents a significant step towards overcoming the barriers in dataset availability, enhancing the potential for broader research and application in AI-driven medical dialogue systems.

Synthetic Arabic Medical Dialogues Using Advanced Multi-Agent LLM Techniques

Diverging from the trend of the previous rumor verification studies, we introduce the new task of rumor verification using evidence that are exclusively captured from authorities, i.e., entities holding the right and knowledge to verify corresponding information. To enable research on this task for Arabic low-resourced language, we construct and release the first Authority-Rumor-Evidence Dataset (AuRED). The dataset comprises 160 rumors expressed in tweets and 692 Twitter timelines of authorities containing about 34k tweets. Additionally, we explore how existing evidence retrieval and claim verification models for fact-checking perform on our task under both the cross-lingual zero-shot and in-domain fine-tuning setups. Our experiments show that although evidence retrieval models perform relatively well on the task establishing strong baselines, there is still a big room for improvement. However, existing claim verification models perform poorly on the task no matter how good the retrieval performance is. The results also show that stance detection can be useful for evidence retrieval. Moreover, existing fact-checking datasets showed a potential in transfer learning to our task, however, further investigation using different datasets and setups is required.

AuRED: Enabling Arabic Rumor Verification using Evidence from Authorities over Twitter

Dialectal Arabic is the primary spoken language used by native Arabic speakers in daily communication. The rise of social media platforms has notably expanded its use as a written language. However, Arabic dialects do not have standard orthographies. This, combined with the inherent noise in user-generated content on social media, presents a major challenge to NLP applications dealing with Dialectal Arabic. In this paper, we explore and report on the task of CODAfication, which aims to normalize Dialectal Arabic into the Conventional Orthography for Dialectal Arabic (CODA). We work with a unique parallel corpus of multiple Arabic dialects focusing on five major city dialects. We benchmark newly developed pretrained sequence-to-sequence models on the task of CODAfication. We further show that using dialect identification information improves the performance across all dialects. We make our code, data, and pretrained models publicly available.

Exploiting Dialect Identification in Automatic Dialectal Text Normalization

Automatic readability assessment is relevant to building NLP applications for education, content analysis, and accessibility. However, Arabic readability assessment is a challenging task due to Arabic's morphological richness and limited readability resources. In this paper, we present a set of experimental results on Arabic readability assessment using a diverse range of approaches, from rule-based methods to Arabic pretrained language models. We report our results on a newly created corpus at different textual granularity levels (words and sentence fragments). Our results show that combining different techniques yields the best results, achieving an overall macro F1 score of 86.7 at the word level and 87.9 at the fragment level on a blind test set. We make our code, data, and pretrained models publicly available.

Strategies for Arabic Readability Modeling

Relational entity extraction is key in building knowledge graphs. A relational entity has a source, a tail and atype. In this paper, we consider Arabic text and introduce evidence enrichment which intuitively informs models for better predictions. Relational evidence is an expression in the text that explains how sources and targets relate. %It also provides hints from which models learn. This paper augments the existing sred relational extraction dataset with evidence annotation to its $2.9$-million Arabic relations. We leverage the augmented dataset to build model, a relation extraction with evidence model from Arabic documents. The evidence augmentation model we constructed to complete the dataset achieved $.82$ F1-score (.93 precision, .73 recall). The target model outperformed SOTA mREBEL with $.72$ F1-score (.78 precision, .66 recall).

AREEj: Arabic Relation Extraction with Evidence

Diacritization plays a pivotal role for meaning disambiguation and improving readability in Arabic texts. Efforts have long focused on marking every eligible character (Full Diacritization). Overlooked in comparison, Partial Diacritzation (`PD`) is the selection of a subset of characters to be annotated to aid comprehension only where needed. Research has indicated that excessive diacritic marks can hinder skilled readers—reducing reading speed and accuracy. We conduct a behavioral experiment and show that partially marked text is often easier to read than fully marked text, and sometimes easier than plain text. In this light, we introduce Context-Contrastive Partial Diacritization (`CCPD`)—a novel approach to `PD` which integrates seamlessly with existing Arabic diacritization systems. `CCPD` processes each word twice, once with context and once without, and diacritizes only the characters with disparities between the two inferences. Further, we introduce novel indicators for measuring partial diacritization quality to help establish this as a machine learning task. Lastly, we introduce `TD2`, a Transformer-variant of an established model which offers a markedly different performance profile on our proposed indicators compared to all other known systems.

A Context-Contrastive Inference Approach To Partial Diacritization

Accurate translation of terminology and adaptation to in-context information is a pillar to high quality translation. Recently, there is a remarkable interest towards the use and the evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) particularly for Machine Translation tasks. Nevertheless, despite their recent advancement and ability to understand and generate human-like language, these LLMs are still far from perfect, especially in domain-specific scenarios, and need to be thoroughly investigated. This is particularly evident in automatically translating legal terminology from Arabic into English and French, where, beyond the inherent complexities of legal language and specialised translations, technical limitations of LLMs further hinder accurate generation of text. In this paper, we present a preliminary evaluation of two evolving LLMs, namely GPT-4 Generative Pre-trained Transformer and Gemini, as legal translators of Arabic legislatives to test their accuracy and the extent to which they care for context and terminology across two language pairs (AR→EN / AR→FR). The study targets the evaluation of Zero-Shot prompting for in-context and out-of-context scenarios of both models relying on a gold standard dataset, verified by professional translators who are also experts in the field. We evaluate the results applying the Multidimensional Quality Metrics to classify translation errors. Moreover, we also evaluate the general LLMs outputs to verify their correctness, consistency, and completeness. In general, our results show that the models are far from perfect and recall for more fine-tuning efforts using specialised terminological data in the legal domain from Arabic into English and French.

Large Language Models as Legal Translators of Arabic Legislation: Do ChatGPT and Gemini Care for Context and Terminology?

Zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) systems have advanced for English, however, it still lags behind due to insufficient resources. We address this gap for Arabic, a language of more than 450 million native speakers, by first adapting a sizeable existing dataset to suit the needs of speech synthesis. Additionally, we employ a set of Arabic dialect identification models to explore the impact of pre-defined dialect labels on improving the ZS-TTS model in a multi-dialect setting. Subsequently, we fine-tune the XTTS model, an open-source architecture. We then evaluate our models on a dataset comprising 31 unseen speakers and an in-house dialectal dataset. Our automated and human evaluation results show convincing performance while capable of generating dialectal speech. Our study highlights significant potential for improvements in this emerging area of research in Arabic.

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Engineering Conversational Search Systems: A Review of Applications, Architectures, and Functional Components

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