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Emotion classification has wide applications in education, robotics, virtual reality, etc. However, identifying subtle differences between fine-grained emotion categories remains challenging. Current methods typically aggregate numerous token embeddings of a sentence into a single vector, which, while being an efficient compressor, may not fully capture complex semantic and temporal distributions. To solve this problem, we propose SEmantic ANchor Graph Neural Networks (SEAN-GNN) for fine-grained emotion classification. It learns a group of representative, multi-faceted semantic anchors in the token embedding space: using these anchors as a global reference, any sentence can be projected onto them to form a &quot;semantic-anchor graph&#39;&#39;, with node attributes and edge weights quantifying the semantic and temporal information respectively. The graph structure is well aligned across sentences and, importantly, allows for generating comprehensive emotion representations regarding $K$ different anchors. Message passing on this graph can further integrate and refine the learned features. Empirically, SEAN-GNN can generate meaningful semantic anchors and discriminative graph patterns for different emotion, with promising classification results on 6 popular benchmark datasets against state-of-the-arts.

EMNLP 2024

Message Passing on Semantic-Anchor-Graphs for Fine-grained Emotion Representation Learning and Classification

historical nlp

corpus creation

applications

benchmarking

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

Emotion classification has wide applications in education, robotics, virtual reality, etc. However, identifying subtle differences between fine-grained emotion categories remains challenging. Current methods typically aggregate numerous token embeddings of a sentence into a single vector, which, while being an efficient compressor, may not fully capture complex semantic and temporal distributions. To solve this problem, we propose SEmantic ANchor Graph Neural Networks (SEAN-GNN) for fine-grained emotion classification. It learns a group of representative, multi-faceted semantic anchors in the token embedding space: using these anchors as a global reference, any sentence can be projected onto them to form a "semantic-anchor graph'', with node attributes and edge weights quantifying the semantic and temporal information respectively. The graph structure is well aligned across sentences and, importantly, allows for generating comprehensive emotion representations regarding $K$ different anchors. Message passing on this graph can further integrate and refine the learned features. Empirically, SEAN-GNN can generate meaningful semantic anchors and discriminative graph patterns for different emotion, with promising classification results on 6 popular benchmark datasets against state-of-the-arts.

poster

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Proverbs carry wisdom transferred orally from generation to generation. Based on the place they were recorded, this study introduces a publicly-available and machine-actionable dataset of more than one hundred thousand Greek proverb variants. By quantifying the spatial distribution of proverbs, we show that the most widespread proverbs come from the mainland while the least widespread proverbs come primarily from the islands. By focusing on the least dispersed proverbs, we present the most frequent tokens per location and undertake a benchmark in geographical attribution, using text classification and regression (text geocoding). Our results show that this is a challenging task for which specific locations can be attributed more successfully compared to others. The potential of our resource and benchmark is showcased by two novel applications. First, we extracted terms moving the regression prediction toward the four cardinal directions. Second, we leveraged conformal prediction to attribute 3,676 unregistered proverbs with statistically rigorous predictions of locations each of these proverbs was possibly registered in.

Towards a Greek Proverb Atlas: Computational Spatial Exploration and Attribution of Greek Proverbs

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A Simple yet Effective Training-free Prompt-free Approach to Chinese Spelling Correction Based on Large Language Models

While large language models (LLMs) excel in many domains, their complexity and scale challenge deployment in resource-limited environments. Current compression techniques, such as parameter pruning, often fail to effectively utilize the knowledge from pruned parameters. To address these challenges, we propose Manifold-Based Knowledge Alignment and Layer Merging Compression (MKA), a novel approach that uses manifold learning and the Information Bottleneck (IB) measure to merge similar layers, reducing model size while preserving essential performance. We evaluate MKA on multiple benchmark datasets and various LLMs. Our findings show that MKA not only preserves model performance but also achieves substantial compression ratios, outperforming traditional pruning methods. Moreover, when coupled with quantization, MKA delivers even greater compression. Specifically, on the MMLU dataset using the Llama3-8B model, MKA achieves a compression ratio of 43.75\% with a minimal performance decrease of only 2.82\%. The proposed MKA method offers a resource-efficient and performance-preserving model compression technique for LLMs. We make our code available at https://github.com/SempraETY/Pruning-via-Merging

Pruning via Merging: Compressing LLMs via Manifold Alignment Based Layer Merging

Training a task-oriented dialogue policy using deep reinforcement learning is promising but requires extensive environment exploration. The amount of wasted invalid exploration makes policy learning inefficient. In this paper, we define and argue that dead-end states are important reasons for invalid exploration. When a conversation enters a dead-end state, regardless of the actions taken afterward, it will continue in a dead-end trajectory until the agent reaches a termination state or maximum turn. We propose a Dead-end Detection and Resurrection (DDR) method that detects dead-end states in an efficient manner and provides a rescue action to guide and correct the exploration direction. To prevent dialogue policies from repeating errors, DDR also performs dialogue data augmentation by adding relevant experiences that include dead-end states and penalties into the experience pool. We first validate the dead-end detection reliability and then demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of the method across various domains through experiments on four public dialogue datasets.

Rescue Conversations from Dead-ends: Efficient Exploration for Task-oriented Dialogue Policy Optimization

Identifying and understanding user intents is a pivotal task for E-Commerce. Despite its essential role in product recommendation and business user profiling analysis, intent understanding has not been consistently defined or accurately benchmarked. In this paper, we focus on predicative user intents as “how a customer uses a product”, and pose intent understanding as a natural language reasoning task, independent of product ontologies. We identify two weaknesses of FolkScope, the SOTA E-Commerce Intent Knowledge Graph: category-rigidity and property-ambiguity. They limit its ability to strongly align user intents with products having the most desirable property, and to recommend useful products across diverse categories. Following these observations, we introduce a Product Recovery Benchmark featuring a novel evaluation framework and an example dataset. We further validate the above FolkScope weaknesses on this benchmark. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/stayones/Usgae-Centric-Intent-Understanding.

A Usage-centric Take on Intent Understanding in E-Commerce

Tool learning has generated widespread interest as a vital means of interaction between Large Language Models (LLMs) and the physical world. Current research predominantly emphasizes LLMs' capacity to utilize tools in well-structured environments while overlooking their stability when confronted with the inevitable noise of the real world. To bridge this gap, we introduce *RoTBench*, a multi-level benchmark for evaluating the robustness of LLMs in tool learning. Specifically, we establish five external environments, each featuring varying levels of noise (i.e., Clean, Slight, Medium, Heavy, and Union), providing an in-depth analysis of the model's resilience across three critical phases: tool selection, parameter identification, and content filling. Experiments involving six widely-used models underscore the urgent necessity for enhancing the robustness of LLMs in tool learning. For instance, the performance of GPT-4 even drops significantly from 80.00 to 58.10 when there is no substantial change in manual accuracy. More surprisingly, the noise correction capability inherent in the GPT family paradoxically impedes its adaptability in the face of mild noise. In light of these findings, we propose RoTTuning, a strategy that enriches the diversity of training environments to bolster the robustness of LLMs in tool learning. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Junjie-Ye/RoTBench.

RoTBench: A Multi-Level Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models in Tool Learning

The utilization of Large Language Models (LLMs) in financial trading has primarily been concentrated within the stock market, aiding in economic and financial decisions. Yet, the unique opportunities presented by the cryptocurrency market, noted for its on-chain data's transparency and the critical influence of off-chain signals like news, remain largely untapped by LLMs. This work aims to bridge the gap by developing an LLM-based trading agent, CryptoTrade, which uniquely combines the analysis of on-chain and off-chain data. This approach leverages the transparency and immutability of on-chain data, as well as the timeliness and influence of off-chain signals, providing a comprehensive overview of the cryptocurrency market. CryptoTrade incorporates a reflective mechanism specifically engineered to refine its daily trading decisions by analyzing the outcomes of prior trading decisions. This research makes two significant contributions. Firstly, it broadens the applicability of LLMs to the domain of cryptocurrency trading. Secondly, it establishes a benchmark for cryptocurrency trading strategies. Through extensive experiments, CryptoTrade has demonstrated superior performance in maximizing returns compared to time-series baselines, but not compared to traditional trading signals, across various cryptocurrencies and market conditions. Our code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/CryptoTrade}

A Reflective LLM-based Agent to Guide Zero-shot Cryptocurrency Trading

Legal case retrieval (LCR) aims to provide similar cases as references for a given fact description. This task is crucial for promoting consistent judgments in similar cases, effectively enhancing judicial fairness and improving work efficiency for judges. However, existing works face two main challenges for real-world applications: existing works mainly focus on case-to-case retrieval using lengthy queries, which does not match real-world scenarios; and the limited data scale, with current datasets containing only hundreds of queries, is insufficient to satisfy the training requirements of existing data-hungry neural models. To address these issues, we introduce an automated method to construct synthetic query-candidate pairs and build the largest LCR dataset to date, LEAD, which is hundreds of times larger than existing datasets. This data construction method can provide ample training signals for LCR models. Experimental results demonstrate that model training with our constructed data can achieve state-of-the-art results on two widely-used LCR benchmarks. Besides, the construction method can also be applied to civil cases and achieve promising results. The data and codes can be found in https://github.com/thunlp/LEAD.

Enhancing Legal Case Retrieval via Scaling High-quality Synthetic Query-Candidate Pairs

The automation of radiology report generation (RRG) holds immense potential to alleviate radiologists' workloads and improve diagnostic accuracy. Despite advancements in image captioning and vision-language pretraining, RRG remains challenging due to the lengthy and complex nature of radiology reports. In this work, we proposes the Divide and Conquer Radiology Report Generation (DCRRG) model, which breaks down full-text radiology reports into concise observation descriptions. This approach enables the model to capture fine-grained representations from each observation through a two-stage process: an encoding stage focusing on observation prediction tasks to learn fine-grained representations, and a decoding stage for integrating these descriptions into cohesive and comprehensive radiology reports. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that DCRRG achieves significant improvements across all evaluated metrics, underscoring its capability to generate semantically coherent and clinically accurate radiology reports.

Divide and Conquer Radiology Report Generation via Observation Level Fine-grained Pretraining and Prompt Tuning

Human and model-generated texts can be distinguished by examining the magnitude of likelihood in language. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult as language model's capabilities of generating human-like texts keep evolving. This study provides a new perspective by using the relative likelihood values instead of absolute ones, and extracting useful features from the spectrum-view of likelihood for the human-model text detection task. We propose a detection procedure with two classification methods, supervised and heuristic-based, respectively, which results in competitive performances with previous zero-shot detection methods and a new state-of-the-art on short-text detection. Our method can also reveal subtle differences between human and model languages, which find theoretical roots in psycholinguistics studies.

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Towards a Greek Proverb Atlas: Computational Spatial Exploration and Attribution of Greek Proverbs

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