Thailand

Attribute value extraction involves identifying the value spans of predetermined attributes in product texts. This area of research has traditionally operated under a closed-world assumption, focusing on products from a static set of categories and their associated attributes. However, products in e-commerce stores are ever-increasing and evolving, calling for life-long learning. If continuously trained on the fast-increasing products and attributes, most existing solutions not only struggle for parameter efficiency but also endure foreseeable defects due to data contamination, catastrophic forgetting, etc. As a remedy, we propose and study a new task, which aims to effectively maintain a strong single model for many domains in a life-long learning fashion, without jeopardizing the model performance and parameter efficiency. We introduce factorization into the model and make it domain-aware by decoupling the modeling of product type and attribute, as a way to promote de-contamination and parameter efficiency while scaling up. Tuning the model with distillation prevents forgetting historical knowledge and enables continuous learning from emerging domains. Experiments on hundreds of domains showed that our model attains the near state-of-the-art performance with affordable parameter size, the least historical knowledge forgetting, and the greatest robustness against noises, whilst adding only a few parameters per domain when compared with competitive baselines.

ACL 2024

Stronger, Lighter, Better: Towards Life-Long Attribute Value Extraction for E-Commerce Products

life-long learning

factorization

parameter efficiency

attribute value extraction

adapter

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

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. 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.

Extractive summarization can produce faithful summaries but often requires additional constraints such as a desired summary length. Traditional sentence compression models do not typically consider the constraints because of their restricted model abilities, which require model modifications for coping with them. To bridge this gap, we propose Instruction-based Compression (InstructCMP), an approach to the sentence compression task that can consider the length constraint through instructions by leveraging the zero-shot task-solving abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). For this purpose, we created new evaluation datasets by transforming traditional sentence compression datasets into an instruction format. By using the datasets, we first reveal that the current LLMs still face challenges in accurately controlling the length for a compressed text. To address this issue, we propose an approach named length priming, that incorporates additional length information into the instructions without external resources. While the length priming effectively works in a zero-shot setting, a training dataset with the instructions would further improve the ability of length control. Thus, we additionally created a training dataset in an instruction format to fine-tune the model on it. Experimental results and analysis show that applying the length priming significantly improves performances of InstructCMP in both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings without the need of any model modifications.

InstructCMP: Length Control in Sentence Compression through Instruction-based Large Language Models

Event Extraction (EE) is an essential information extraction task that aims to extract event-related information from unstructured texts.
The paradigm of this task has shifted from conventional classification-based methods to more contemporary question-answering-based (QA-based) approaches. However, in QA-based EE, the quality of the questions dramatically affects the extraction accuracy, and how to generate high-quality questions for QA-based EE remains a challenge. In this work, to tackle this challenge, we suggest four criteria to evaluate the quality of a question and propose a reinforcement learning method, RLQG, for QA-based EE that can generate generalizable, high-quality, and context-dependent questions and provides clear guidance to QA models. The extensive experiments conducted on ACE and RAMS datasets have strongly validated our approach's effectiveness, which also demonstrates its robustness in scenarios with limited training data. The corresponding code of RLQG is released for further research.

Towards Better Question Generation in QA-based Event Extraction

Recent mainstream event argument extraction methods process each event in isolation, resulting in inefficient inference and ignoring the correlations among multiple events. To address these limitations, here we propose a multiple-event argument extraction model DEEIA (Dependency-guided Encoding and Event-specific Information Aggregation), capable of extracting arguments from all events within a document simultaneously. The proposed DEEIA model employs a multi-event prompt mechanism, comprising DE and EIA modules. The DE module is designed to improve the correlation between prompts and their corresponding event contexts, whereas the EIA module provides event-specific information to improve contextual understanding. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on four public datasets (RAMS, WikiEvents, MLEE, and ACE05), while significantly saving the inference time compared to the baselines. Further analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules.

Beyond Single-Event Extraction: Towards Efficient Document-Level Multi-Event Argument Extraction

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an important task, but to achieve great performance, it is usually necessary to collect a large amount of labeled data, incurring high costs. In this paper, we propose using open-source Large Language Models (LLM) to generate NER data with only a few labeled examples, reducing the cost of human annotations. Our proposed method is very simple and can perform well using only a few labeled data points. Experimental results on diverse low-resource NER datasets show that our proposed data generation method can significantly improve the baseline. Additionally, our method can be used to augment datasets with class-imbalance problems and consistently improves model performance on macro-F1 metrics.

Pushing the Limits of Low-Resource NER Using LLM Artificial Data Generation

In the current landscape of large language models (LLMs), the process of instruction tuning serves as an essential step. Considering the high computing power overhead, data-efficient instruction tuning was proposed to reduce the training data size in this process, aiming at selecting high-quality instructional data. Nevertheless, we argue that most current data-efficient instruction-tuning methods are highly dependent on the quality of the original instruction-tuning dataset. When it comes to datasets synthesized by LLMs, a common scenario in this field, dirty samples will even be selected with a higher probability than other samples. To address these challenges, we utilized external knowledge (relevant examples or paragraphs) to evaluate those samples synthesized by LLMs with an in-context-based relative predictive entropy. Based on the new metric, we proposed a framework, dubbed as \textbf{RECOST}, which integrates external-knowledge-base re-ranking and diversity-consistent sampling into a single pipeline. Through extensive experiments on several synthetic datasets (Alpaca and Alpaca-gpt4), we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and achieve even better results with only \textbf{1\%} of the full dataset.

RECOST: External Knowledge Guided Data-efficient Instruction Tuning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been found to have difficulty knowing they do not possess certain knowledge and tend to provide specious answers in such cases. Retrieval Augmentation (RA) has been extensively studied to mitigate LLMs' hallucinations. However, due to the extra overhead and unassured quality of retrieval, it may not be optimal to conduct RA all the time. A straightforward idea is to only conduct retrieval when LLMs are uncertain about a question. This motivates us to enhance the LLMs' ability to perceive their knowledge boundaries to help RA. In this paper, we first quantitatively measure LLMs' such ability and confirm their overconfidence. Then, we study how LLMs' certainty about a question correlates with their dependence on external retrieved information. We propose several methods to enhance LLMs' perception of knowledge boundaries and show that they are effective in reducing overconfidence. Additionally, equipped with these methods, LLMs can achieve comparable or even better performance of RA with much fewer retrieval calls.

When Do LLMs Need Retrieval Augmentation? Mitigating LLMs' Overconfidence Helps Retrieval Augmentation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks but often require additional training, such as continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. However, the costs associated with this, primarily due to their large parameter count, remain high. This paper proposes leveraging \emph{sparsity} in pre-trained LLMs to expedite this training process. By observing sparsity in activated neurons during forward iterations, we identify the potential for computational speed-ups by excluding inactive neurons. We address associated challenges by extending existing neuron importance evaluation metrics and introducing a ladder omission rate scheduler. Our experiments on Llama-2 demonstrate that Sparsity-Accelerated Training (SAT) achieves comparable or superior performance to standard training while significantly accelerating the process. Specifically, SAT achieves a $45\%$ throughput improvement in continual pre-training and saves $38\%$ training time in supervised fine-tuning. It offers a simple, hardware-agnostic, and easily deployable framework for additional LLM training.

Sparsity-Accelerated Training for Large Language Models

The natural language processing field has been evolving around language models for the past few years, from the usage of n-gram language models for re-ranking, to transfer learning with encoder-only (BERT-like) language models, and finally to large language models (LLMs) as general solvers. LLMs are dominated by the decoder-only type, and they are popular for their efficacy in numerous tasks. LLMs are regarded as having strong comprehension abilities and strong capabilities to solve new unseen tasks. As such, people may quickly assume that decoder-only LLMs always perform better than the encoder-only ones, especially for understanding word meaning. In this paper, we demonstrate that decoder-only LLMs perform worse on word meaning comprehension than an encoder-only language model that has vastly fewer parameters.

Are Decoder-Only Language Models Better than Encoder-Only Language Models in Understanding Word Meaning?

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.

PAI-Diffusion: Constructing and Serving a Family of Open Chinese Diffusion Models for Text-to-image Synthesis on the Cloud

Instruction tuning significantly enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) across various tasks. However, the procedure to optimizing the mixing of instruction datasets for LLM fine-tuning is still poorly understood. This study categorizes instructions into three primary types: NLP downstream tasks, coding, and general chat. We explore the effects of instruction tuning on different combinations of datasets on LLM performance, and find that certain instruction types are more advantageous for specific applications but can negatively impact other areas. This work provides insights into instruction mixtures, laying the foundations for future research.

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InstructCMP: Length Control in Sentence Compression through Instruction-based Large Language Models

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