Singapore

This research paper focuses on developing an improved Bangla Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system, addressing the challenges posed by the complexity of Bangla text structure, diverse handwriting styles, and the scarcity of comprehensive datasets. Leveraging recent advancements in Deep Learning and OCR techniques, we anticipate a significant enhancement in the performance of Bangla OCR by utilizing a large and diverse collection of labeled Bangla text image datasets. This study introduces the most extensive gold standard corpus for Bangla characters and words, comprising over 4 million human-annotated images. Our dataset encompasses various document types, such as Computer Compose, Letterpress, Typewriters, Outdoor Banner-Poster, and Handwritten documents, gathered from diverse sources. The entire corpus has undergone meticulous human annotation, employing a controlled annotation procedure consisting of three-step annotation and one-step validation, ensuring adherence to gold standard criteria. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the complete data collection procedure. The ICT Division, Government of the People&#39;s Republic of Bangladesh, will make the dataset publicly available, facilitating further research and development in Bangla OCR and related domains.

EMNLP 2023

Gold Standard Bangla OCR Dataset: An In-Depth Look at Data Preprocessing and Annotation Processes

bangla

annotation

dataset

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

This research paper focuses on developing an improved Bangla Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system, addressing the challenges posed by the complexity of Bangla text structure, diverse handwriting styles, and the scarcity of comprehensive datasets. Leveraging recent advancements in Deep Learning and OCR techniques, we anticipate a significant enhancement in the performance of Bangla OCR by utilizing a large and diverse collection of labeled Bangla text image datasets. This study introduces the most extensive gold standard corpus for Bangla characters and words, comprising over 4 million human-annotated images. Our dataset encompasses various document types, such as Computer Compose, Letterpress, Typewriters, Outdoor Banner-Poster, and Handwritten documents, gathered from diverse sources. The entire corpus has undergone meticulous human annotation, employing a controlled annotation procedure consisting of three-step annotation and one-step validation, ensuring adherence to gold standard criteria. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the complete data collection procedure. The ICT Division, Government of the People's Republic of Bangladesh, will make the dataset publicly available, facilitating further research and development in Bangla OCR and related domains.

technical paper

A Personalized Query Rewriting system strives to minimize defective queries to ensure robust conversational functionality by considering individual user behavior and preferences. It's designed as a search-based system, maintaining a user index of past successful interactions with the conversational AI. However, this method faces challenges with unseen interactions, which refers to novel user interactions not covered by the user's historical index.

This paper introduces our Collaborative Query Rewriting approach, which utilizes underlying topological information to assist in rewriting defective queries arising from unseen user interactions. This approach begins by constructing a "User Feedback Interaction Graph" (FIG) using historical user-entity interactions. Subsequently, we traverse through the graph edges to establish an enhanced user index, referred to as the "collaborative user index". 

This paper then further explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in conjunction with graph traversal, leading to a significant increase in index coverage for unseen interactions. The effectiveness of our proposed approach has been proven through experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset and online A/B experiments.

Graph Meets LLM: A Novel Approach to Collaborative Filtering for Robust Conversational Understanding

Applying machine learning to financial time series has been an active area of industrial research enabling innovation in market insights, risk management, strategic decision-making, and policy formation. This paper explores the novel use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for explainable financial time series forecasting, addressing challenges in cross-sequence reasoning, multi-modal data integration, and result interpretation that are inherent in traditional approaches. Focusing on NASDAQ-100 stocks, we utilize public historical stock data, company metadata, and economic/financial news. Our experiments employ GPT-4 for zero-shot/few-shot inference and Open LLaMA for instruction-based fine-tuning. The study demonstrates LLMs' ability to generate well-reasoned decisions by leveraging cross-sequence information and extracting insights from text and price time series. We show that our LLM-based approach outperforms classic ARMA-GARCH and gradient-boosting tree models. Furthermore, fine-tuned public LLMs, such as Open-LLaMA, can generate reasonable and explainable forecasts, although they underperform compared to GPT-4.

Harnessing LLMs for Temporal Data - A Study on Explainable Financial Time Series Forecasting

Contextual query rewriting (CQR) is a crucial component in Conversational AI agents, leveraging the contextual information from previous user-agent conversations to improve the comprehension of current user intent. However, traditional CQR methods often concentrate on supervised fine-tuning only, neglecting the opportunities to learn from user feedback to align with user preferences. Inspired by recent advances in learning from human feedback (LHF), this paper proposes a novel Preference Aligned Contextual Query Rewriting (PA-CQR) framework to enhance the CQR model's capability in generating user preference-aligned rewrites. This paper also investigates the efficacy of various state-of-the-art feedback learning algorithms on the CQR task, and proposes a novel Dynamic Direct Preference Optimization (Dynamic DPO) algorithm to better adapt the DPO algorithm to large-scale CQR training. Experiments on large-scale real-world CQR data set demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PA-CQR framework and the Dynamic DPO.

Improving Contextual Query Rewrite for Conversational AI Agents through User-preference Feedback Learning | VIDEO

We propose InsightNet, a novel approach for the automated extraction of structured insights from customer reviews. 
Our end-to-end machine learning framework is designed to overcome the limitations of current solutions, including the absence of structure for identified topics, non-standard aspect names, and lack of abundant training data. 
The proposed solution builds a semi-supervised multi-level taxonomy from raw reviews, a semantic similarity heuristic approach to generate labelled data and employs a multi-task insight extraction architecture by fine-tuning an LLM.
InsightNet identifies granular actionable topics with customer sentiments and verbatim for each topic. 
Evaluations on real-world customer review data show that InsightNet performs better than existing solutions in terms of structure, hierarchy and completeness. 
We empirically demonstrate that InsightNet outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods in multi-label topic classification, achieving an F1 score of 0.85, which is an improvement of 11% F1-score over the previous best results.
Additionally, InsightNet generalises well for unseen aspects and suggests new topics to be added to the taxonomy.

InsightNet : Structured Insight Mining from Customer Feedback | VIDEO

E-commerce product catalogs contain billions of items. Most products have lengthy titles, as sellers pack them with product attributes to improve retrieval, and highlight key product aspects. This results in a gap between such unnatural products titles, and how customers refer to them. It also limits how e-commerce stores can use these seller-provided titles for recommendation, QA, or review summarization.

Inspired by recent work on instruction-tuned LLMs, we present InstructPTS, a controllable approach for the task of Product Title Summarization (PTS). Trained using a novel instruction fine-tuning strategy, our approach is able to summarize product titles according to various criteria (e.g. number of words in a summary, inclusion of specific phrases, etc.). Extensive evaluation on a real-world e-commerce catalog shows that compared to simple fine-tuning of LLMs, our proposed approach can generate more accurate product name summaries, with an improvement of over 14 and 8 BLEU and ROUGE points, respectively.

InstructPTS: Instruction-Tuning LLMs for Product Title Summarization

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.

Investigating Table-to-Text Generation Capabilities of Large Language Models in Real-World Information Seeking Scenarios

In this study, we introduce JarviX, a sophisticated data analytics framework. JarviX is designed to employ Large Language Models (LLMs) to facilitate an automated guide and execute high-precision data analyzes on tabular datasets. This framework emphasizes the significance of varying column types, capitalizing on state-of-the-art LLMs to generate concise data insight summaries, propose relevant analysis inquiries, visualize data effectively, and provide comprehensive explanations for results drawn from an extensive data analysis pipeline. Moreover, JarviX incorporates an automated machine learning (AutoML) pipeline for predictive modeling. This integration forms a comprehensive and automated optimization cycle, which proves particularly advantageous for optimizing machine configuration. The efficacy and adaptability of JarviX are substantiated through a series of practical use case studies.

JarviX: A LLM No code Platform for Tabular Data Analysis and Optimization

Utilizing natural language processing techniques in clinical conversations is effective to improve the efficiency of health management workflows for medical staff and patients. Dialogue segmentation and topic categorization are two fundamental steps for processing verbose spoken conversations and highlighting informative spans for downstream tasks. However, in practical use cases, due to the variety of segmentation granularity and topic definition, and the lack of diverse annotated corpora, no generic models are readily applicable for domain-specific applications. In this work, we introduce and adopt a joint model for dialogue segmentation and topic categorization, and conduct a case study on healthcare follow-up calls for diabetes management; we provide insights from both data and model perspectives toward performance and robustness.

Joint Dialogue Topic Segmentation and Categorization: A Case Study on Clinical Spoken Conversations

Real-time semantic matching is vital to web and product search. Transformer-based models have shown to be highly effective at encoding queries into an embedding space where semantically similar entities (queries or results) are in close proximity. However, the computational complexity of large transformer models limits their utilization for real-time matching. In this paper, we propose KD-Boost, a novel knowledge distillation algorithm designed for real-time semantic matching. KD-Boost trains low latency accurate student models by leveraging soft labels from a teacher model as well as ground truth via pairwise query-product and query-query signal derived from direct audits, user behavior, and taxonomy-based data using custom loss functions. Experiments on internal and external e-commerce datasets demonstrate an improvement of 2-3% ROC-AUC compared to training student models directly, outperforming teacher and SOTA knowledge distillation benchmarks. Simulated online A/B tests using KD-Boost for automated Query Reformulation (QR) indicate a 6.31% increase in query-to-query matching, 2.76% increase in product coverage, and a 2.19% improvement in relevance.

KD-Boost: Boosting Real-Time Semantic Matching in E-commerce with Knowledge Distillation

Multilingual sentence representations are the foundation for similarity-based bitext mining, which is crucial for scaling multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) system to more languages. In this paper, we introduce MuSR: a one-for-all Multilingual Sentence Representation model that supports 223 languages. Leveraging billions of English-centric parallel corpora, we train a multilingual Transformer encoder, coupled with an auxiliary Transformer decoder, by adopting a multilingual NMT framework with CrossConST, a cross-lingual consistency regularization technique proposed in Gao et al. (2023). Experimental results on multilingual similarity search and bitext mining tasks show the effectiveness of our approach. Specifically, MuSR achieves superior performance over LASER3 (Heffernan et al., 2022) which consists of 148 independent multilingual sentence encoders.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Graph Meets LLM: A Novel Approach to Collaborative Filtering for Robust Conversational Understanding

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Pipeline Enabling Zero-shot Classification for Bangla Handwritten Grapheme

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Downloads