Thailand

Large autoregressive generative models have emerged as the cornerstone for achieving the highest performance across several Natural Language Processing tasks. However, the urge to attain superior results has, at times, led to the premature replacement of carefully designed task-specific approaches without exhaustive experimentation. The Coreference Resolution task is no exception; all recent state-of-the-art solutions adopt large generative autoregressive models that outperform encoder-based discriminative systems. In this work, we challenge this recent trend by introducing Maverick, a carefully designed -- yet simple -- pipeline, which enables running a state-of-the-art Coreference Resolution system within the constraints of an academic budget, outperforming models with up to 13 billion parameters with as few as 500 million parameters. Maverick achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CoNLL-2012 benchmark, training with up to 0.006x the memory resources and obtaining a 170x faster inference compared to previous state-of-the-art systems. We extensively validate the robustness of the Maverick framework with an array of diverse experiments, reporting improvements over prior systems in data-scarce, long-document, and out-of-domain settings. We release our code and models for research purposes at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/maverick-coref.

ACL 2024

Maverick: Efficient and Accurate Coreference Resolution Defying Recent Trends

encoder-only

sota

efficiency

state of the art

coreference resolution

information extraction

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. <br>Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.<br><br><br>

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Please register!

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.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at synthesizing key information from diverse sources. However, generating accurate and faithful multimodal summaries is challenging, primarily due to the lack of appropriate multimodal datasets for fine-tuning that meaningfully integrate textual and visual modalities. To address this gap, we present a new dataset designed specifically for image-text multimodal summarization, harnessing the capabilities of state-of-the-art MLLMs. We generate summaries from Wikipedia sections and corresponding images and evaluate them across text-based, visual and multimodal dimensions, employing reference-free metrics. To refine the dataset, we: (1) Filter the MLLM-generated summaries by training a critic model on human annotations and using its predictions to remove low-quality summaries; (2) Fine-tune the MLLM with the filtered high-quality summaries; (3) Use the fine-tuned model in turn to regenerate the summaries. This self-refinement process significantly improves summary quality, as measured by human judgements and automatic multimodal metrics, resulting in a valuable dataset for multimodal summarization research. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/amazon-science/refinesumm.

REFINESUMM: Self-Refining MLLM for Generating a Multimodal Summarization Dataset

Facilitated dialogue is increasingly popular as a method of civic engagement and as a method for gathering social insight, but resources for its study are scant. We present Fora, a unique collection of annotated facilitated dialogues. We compile 262 facilitated conversations that were hosted with partner organizations seeking to engage their members and surface insights regarding issues like education, elections, and public health, primarily through the sharing of personal experience. Alongside this corpus of 39,911 speaker turns, we present a framework for the analysis of facilitated dialogue. We taxonomize key personal sharing behaviors and facilitation strategies in the corpus, annotate a 25% sample (10,000+ speaker turns) of the data accordingly, and evaluate and establish baselines on a number of tasks essential to the identification of these phenomena in dialogue. We describe the data, and relate facilitator behavior to turn-taking and participant sharing. We outline how this research can inform future work in understanding and improving facilitated dialogue, parsing spoken conversation, and improving the behavior of dialogue agents.

Fora: A corpus and framework for the study of facilitated dialogue

Machine translation (MT) has historically faced significant challenges when applied to literary works, particularly in the domain of poetry translation. The advent of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT holds potential for innovation in this field. This study examines ChatGPT's capabilities in English-Chinese poetry translation tasks, utilizing targeted prompts and small sample scenarios to ascertain optimal performance. Despite promising outcomes, our analysis reveals persistent issues in the translations generated by ChatGPT that warrant attention. To address these shortcomings, we propose an Explanation-Assisted Poetry Machine Translation (EAPMT) method, which leverages monolingual poetry explanation as a guiding information for the translation process. Furthermore, we refine existing evaluation criteria to better suit the nuances of modern poetry translation. We engaged a panel of professional poets for assessments, complemented evaluations by using GPT-4. The results from both human and machine evaluations demonstrate that our EAPMT method outperforms traditional translation methods of ChatGPT and the existing online systems. This paper validates the efficacy of our method and contributes a novel perspective to machine-assisted literary translation.

What is the Best Way for ChatGPT to Translate Poetry?

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 \href{https://youtu.be/4ZdcuiwFU7I}{Youtube}.

Proofread: Fixes All Errors with One Tap

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.

SeaLLMs - Large Language Models for Southeast Asia

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.

LEGENT: An Open Platform for Embodied Agent

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 â€œWrite me a poem for my mother's birthday.â€ 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.

CharPoet: A Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System Based on Token-free LLM

Customizing LLMs for a specific task involves separating high-quality responses from lower-quality ones. This skill can be developed using supervised fine-tuning with extensive human preference data. However, obtaining a large volume of expert-annotated data is costly for most tasks. In this paper, we explore a novel method to optimize LLMs using ranking metrics. This method trains the model to prioritize the best responses from a pool of candidates created for a particular task. Rather than a traditional full ordering, we advocate for a partial ordering, as achieving consensus on the perfect order of candidate responses can be challenging. Our partial ordering is more robust, less sensitive to noise, and can be achieved with limited human annotations or through heuristic methods. We test our system's improved response generation ability using benchmark datasets, including textual entailment and multi-document question answering. We conduct ablation studies to understand crucial factors, such as how to gather candidate responses for a specific task, determine their most suitable order, and balance supervised fine-tuning with ranking metrics. Our approach, named RESCUE, offers a promising avenue for enhancing the response generation and task accuracy of LLMs.

Rescue: Ranking LLM Responses with Partial Ordering to Improve Response Generation

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.

Fundus: A Simple-to-Use News Scraper Optimized for High Quality Extractions

Code editing encompasses a variety of pragmatic tasks that developers deal with daily. Despite its relevance and practical usefulness, automatic code editing remains an underexplored area in the evolution of deep learning models, partly due to data scarcity. In this work, we explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to edit code based on user instructions. Evaluated on a novel human-written execution-based benchmark dubbed EditEval, we found current models often struggle to fulfill the instructions. In light of this, we contribute InstructCoder, the first instruction-tuning dataset designed to adapt LLMs for general-purpose code editing, containing high-diversity code-editing tasks such as comment insertion, code optimization, and code refactoring. It consists of over 114,000 instruction-input-output triplets and covers multiple distinct code editing scenarios. The collection process starts with filtered commit data sourced from GitHub Python repositories as seeds. Subsequently, the dataset is systematically expanded through an iterative process, where both seed and generated tasks are used to prompt ChatGPT for more data. Our findings reveal that open-source LLMs fine-tuned on InstructCoder can significantly enhance the accuracy of code edits, exhibiting superior code-editing performance matching advanced proprietary LLMs. The datasets and the source code are publicly available.

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REFINESUMM: Self-Refining MLLM for Generating a Multimodal Summarization Dataset

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