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SubscribeDataFinder: Scientific Dataset Recommendation from Natural Language Descriptions
Modern machine learning relies on datasets to develop and validate research ideas. Given the growth of publicly available data, finding the right dataset to use is increasingly difficult. Any research question imposes explicit and implicit constraints on how well a given dataset will enable researchers to answer this question, such as dataset size, modality, and domain. We operationalize the task of recommending datasets given a short natural language description of a research idea, to help people find relevant datasets for their needs. Dataset recommendation poses unique challenges as an information retrieval problem; datasets are hard to directly index for search and there are no corpora readily available for this task. To facilitate this task, we build the DataFinder Dataset which consists of a larger automatically-constructed training set (17.5K queries) and a smaller expert-annotated evaluation set (392 queries). Using this data, we compare various information retrieval algorithms on our test set and present a superior bi-encoder retriever for text-based dataset recommendation. This system, trained on the DataFinder Dataset, finds more relevant search results than existing third-party dataset search engines. To encourage progress on dataset recommendation, we release our dataset and models to the public.
Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus
Large language models have led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks, and researchers are turning to ever-larger text corpora to train them. Some of the largest corpora available are made by scraping significant portions of the internet, and are frequently introduced with only minimal documentation. In this work we provide some of the first documentation for the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4; Raffel et al., 2020), a dataset created by applying a set of filters to a single snapshot of Common Crawl. We begin by investigating where the data came from, and find a significant amount of text from unexpected sources like patents and US military websites. Then we explore the content of the text itself, and find machine-generated text (e.g., from machine translation systems) and evaluation examples from other benchmark NLP datasets. To understand the impact of the filters applied to create this dataset, we evaluate the text that was removed, and show that blocklist filtering disproportionately removes text from and about minority individuals. Finally, we conclude with some recommendations for how to created and document web-scale datasets from a scrape of the internet.
Datasets for Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey
This paper embarks on an exploration into the Large Language Model (LLM) datasets, which play a crucial role in the remarkable advancements of LLMs. The datasets serve as the foundational infrastructure analogous to a root system that sustains and nurtures the development of LLMs. Consequently, examination of these datasets emerges as a critical topic in research. In order to address the current lack of a comprehensive overview and thorough analysis of LLM datasets, and to gain insights into their current status and future trends, this survey consolidates and categorizes the fundamental aspects of LLM datasets from five perspectives: (1) Pre-training Corpora; (2) Instruction Fine-tuning Datasets; (3) Preference Datasets; (4) Evaluation Datasets; (5) Traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) Datasets. The survey sheds light on the prevailing challenges and points out potential avenues for future investigation. Additionally, a comprehensive review of the existing available dataset resources is also provided, including statistics from 444 datasets, covering 8 language categories and spanning 32 domains. Information from 20 dimensions is incorporated into the dataset statistics. The total data size surveyed surpasses 774.5 TB for pre-training corpora and 700M instances for other datasets. We aim to present the entire landscape of LLM text datasets, serving as a comprehensive reference for researchers in this field and contributing to future studies. Related resources are available at: https://github.com/lmmlzn/Awesome-LLMs-Datasets.
OpenWebMath: An Open Dataset of High-Quality Mathematical Web Text
There is growing evidence that pretraining on high quality, carefully thought-out tokens such as code or mathematics plays an important role in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models. For example, Minerva, a PaLM model finetuned on billions of tokens of mathematical documents from arXiv and the web, reported dramatically improved performance on problems that require quantitative reasoning. However, because all known open source web datasets employ preprocessing that does not faithfully preserve mathematical notation, the benefits of large scale training on quantitive web documents are unavailable to the research community. We introduce OpenWebMath, an open dataset inspired by these works containing 14.7B tokens of mathematical webpages from Common Crawl. We describe in detail our method for extracting text and LaTeX content and removing boilerplate from HTML documents, as well as our methods for quality filtering and deduplication. Additionally, we run small-scale experiments by training 1.4B parameter language models on OpenWebMath, showing that models trained on 14.7B tokens of our dataset surpass the performance of models trained on over 20x the amount of general language data. We hope that our dataset, openly released on the Hugging Face Hub, will help spur advances in the reasoning abilities of large language models.
OBELICS: An Open Web-Scale Filtered Dataset of Interleaved Image-Text Documents
Large multimodal models trained on natural documents, which interleave images and text, outperform models trained on image-text pairs on various multimodal benchmarks. However, the datasets used to train these models have not been released, and the collection process has not been fully specified. We introduce the OBELICS dataset, an open web-scale filtered dataset of interleaved image-text documents comprising 141 million web pages extracted from Common Crawl, 353 million associated images, and 115 billion text tokens. We describe the dataset creation process, present comprehensive filtering rules, and provide an analysis of the dataset's content. To show the viability of OBELICS, we train vision and language models of 9 and 80 billion parameters named IDEFICS, and obtain competitive performance on different multimodal benchmarks. We release our dataset, models and code.
AboutMe: Using Self-Descriptions in Webpages to Document the Effects of English Pretraining Data Filters
Large language models' (LLMs) abilities are drawn from their pretraining data, and model development begins with data curation. However, decisions around what data is retained or removed during this initial stage is under-scrutinized. In our work, we ground web text, which is a popular pretraining data source, to its social and geographic contexts. We create a new dataset of 10.3 million self-descriptions of website creators, and extract information about who they are and where they are from: their topical interests, social roles, and geographic affiliations. Then, we conduct the first study investigating how ten "quality" and English language identification (langID) filters affect webpages that vary along these social dimensions. Our experiments illuminate a range of implicit preferences in data curation: we show that some quality classifiers act like topical domain filters, and langID can overlook English content from some regions of the world. Overall, we hope that our work will encourage a new line of research on pretraining data curation practices and its social implications.
MS MARCO Web Search: a Large-scale Information-rich Web Dataset with Millions of Real Click Labels
Recent breakthroughs in large models have highlighted the critical significance of data scale, labels and modals. In this paper, we introduce MS MARCO Web Search, the first large-scale information-rich web dataset, featuring millions of real clicked query-document labels. This dataset closely mimics real-world web document and query distribution, provides rich information for various kinds of downstream tasks and encourages research in various areas, such as generic end-to-end neural indexer models, generic embedding models, and next generation information access system with large language models. MS MARCO Web Search offers a retrieval benchmark with three web retrieval challenge tasks that demand innovations in both machine learning and information retrieval system research domains. As the first dataset that meets large, real and rich data requirements, MS MARCO Web Search paves the way for future advancements in AI and system research. MS MARCO Web Search dataset is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/MS-MARCO-Web-Search.
Quasar: Datasets for Question Answering by Search and Reading
We present two new large-scale datasets aimed at evaluating systems designed to comprehend a natural language query and extract its answer from a large corpus of text. The Quasar-S dataset consists of 37000 cloze-style (fill-in-the-gap) queries constructed from definitions of software entity tags on the popular website Stack Overflow. The posts and comments on the website serve as the background corpus for answering the cloze questions. The Quasar-T dataset consists of 43000 open-domain trivia questions and their answers obtained from various internet sources. ClueWeb09 serves as the background corpus for extracting these answers. We pose these datasets as a challenge for two related subtasks of factoid Question Answering: (1) searching for relevant pieces of text that include the correct answer to a query, and (2) reading the retrieved text to answer the query. We also describe a retrieval system for extracting relevant sentences and documents from the corpus given a query, and include these in the release for researchers wishing to only focus on (2). We evaluate several baselines on both datasets, ranging from simple heuristics to powerful neural models, and show that these lag behind human performance by 16.4% and 32.1% for Quasar-S and -T respectively. The datasets are available at https://github.com/bdhingra/quasar .
Paraphrase Detection: Human vs. Machine Content
The growing prominence of large language models, such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT, has led to increased concerns over academic integrity due to the potential for machine-generated content and paraphrasing. Although studies have explored the detection of human- and machine-paraphrased content, the comparison between these types of content remains underexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of various datasets commonly employed for paraphrase detection tasks and evaluate an array of detection methods. Our findings highlight the strengths and limitations of different detection methods in terms of performance on individual datasets, revealing a lack of suitable machine-generated datasets that can be aligned with human expectations. Our main finding is that human-authored paraphrases exceed machine-generated ones in terms of difficulty, diversity, and similarity implying that automatically generated texts are not yet on par with human-level performance. Transformers emerged as the most effective method across datasets with TF-IDF excelling on semantically diverse corpora. Additionally, we identify four datasets as the most diverse and challenging for paraphrase detection.
M4: Multi-generator, Multi-domain, and Multi-lingual Black-Box Machine-Generated Text Detection
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability to generate fluent responses to a wide variety of user queries, but this has also resulted in concerns regarding the potential misuse of such texts in journalism, educational, and academic context. In this work, we aim to develop automatic systems to identify machine-generated text and to detect potential misuse. We first introduce a large-scale benchmark M4, which is multi-generator, multi-domain, and multi-lingual corpus for machine-generated text detection. Using the dataset, we experiment with a number of methods and we show that it is challenging for detectors to generalize well on unseen examples if they are either from different domains or are generated by different large language models. In such cases, detectors tend to misclassify machine-generated text as human-written. These results show that the problem is far from solved and there is a lot of room for improvement. We believe that our dataset M4, which covers different generators, domains and languages, will enable future research towards more robust approaches for this pressing societal problem. The M4 dataset is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/M4.
WanJuan-CC: A Safe and High-Quality Open-sourced English Webtext Dataset
This paper presents WanJuan-CC, a safe and high-quality open-sourced English webtext dataset derived from Common Crawl data. The study addresses the challenges of constructing large-scale pre-training datasets for language models, which require vast amounts of high-quality data. A comprehensive process was designed to handle Common Crawl data, including extraction, heuristic rule filtering, fuzzy deduplication, content safety filtering, and data quality filtering. From approximately 68 billion original English documents, we obtained 2.22T Tokens of safe data and selected 1.0T Tokens of high-quality data as part of WanJuan-CC. We have open-sourced 300B Tokens from this dataset. The paper also provides statistical information related to data quality, enabling users to select appropriate data according to their needs. To evaluate the quality and utility of the dataset, we trained 1B-parameter and 3B-parameter models using WanJuan-CC and another dataset, RefinedWeb. Results show that WanJuan-CC performs better on validation datasets and downstream tasks.
Multimodal datasets: misogyny, pornography, and malignant stereotypes
We have now entered the era of trillion parameter machine learning models trained on billion-sized datasets scraped from the internet. The rise of these gargantuan datasets has given rise to formidable bodies of critical work that has called for caution while generating these large datasets. These address concerns surrounding the dubious curation practices used to generate these datasets, the sordid quality of alt-text data available on the world wide web, the problematic content of the CommonCrawl dataset often used as a source for training large language models, and the entrenched biases in large-scale visio-linguistic models (such as OpenAI's CLIP model) trained on opaque datasets (WebImageText). In the backdrop of these specific calls of caution, we examine the recently released LAION-400M dataset, which is a CLIP-filtered dataset of Image-Alt-text pairs parsed from the Common-Crawl dataset. We found that the dataset contains, troublesome and explicit images and text pairs of rape, pornography, malign stereotypes, racist and ethnic slurs, and other extremely problematic content. We outline numerous implications, concerns and downstream harms regarding the current state of large scale datasets while raising open questions for various stakeholders including the AI community, regulators, policy makers and data subjects.
HashSet -- A Dataset For Hashtag Segmentation
Hashtag segmentation is the task of breaking a hashtag into its constituent tokens. Hashtags often encode the essence of user-generated posts, along with information like topic and sentiment, which are useful in downstream tasks. Hashtags prioritize brevity and are written in unique ways -- transliterating and mixing languages, spelling variations, creative named entities. Benchmark datasets used for the hashtag segmentation task -- STAN, BOUN -- are small in size and extracted from a single set of tweets. However, datasets should reflect the variations in writing styles of hashtags and also account for domain and language specificity, failing which the results will misrepresent model performance. We argue that model performance should be assessed on a wider variety of hashtags, and datasets should be carefully curated. To this end, we propose HashSet, a dataset comprising of: a) 1.9k manually annotated dataset; b) 3.3M loosely supervised dataset. HashSet dataset is sampled from a different set of tweets when compared to existing datasets and provides an alternate distribution of hashtags to build and validate hashtag segmentation models. We show that the performance of SOTA models for Hashtag Segmentation drops substantially on proposed dataset, indicating that the proposed dataset provides an alternate set of hashtags to train and assess models.
MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset
We introduce a large scale MAchine Reading COmprehension dataset, which we name MS MARCO. The dataset comprises of 1,010,916 anonymized questions---sampled from Bing's search query logs---each with a human generated answer and 182,669 completely human rewritten generated answers. In addition, the dataset contains 8,841,823 passages---extracted from 3,563,535 web documents retrieved by Bing---that provide the information necessary for curating the natural language answers. A question in the MS MARCO dataset may have multiple answers or no answers at all. Using this dataset, we propose three different tasks with varying levels of difficulty: (i) predict if a question is answerable given a set of context passages, and extract and synthesize the answer as a human would (ii) generate a well-formed answer (if possible) based on the context passages that can be understood with the question and passage context, and finally (iii) rank a set of retrieved passages given a question. The size of the dataset and the fact that the questions are derived from real user search queries distinguishes MS MARCO from other well-known publicly available datasets for machine reading comprehension and question-answering. We believe that the scale and the real-world nature of this dataset makes it attractive for benchmarking machine reading comprehension and question-answering models.
Query of CC: Unearthing Large Scale Domain-Specific Knowledge from Public Corpora
Large language models have demonstrated remarkable potential in various tasks, however, there remains a significant scarcity of open-source models and data for specific domains. Previous works have primarily focused on manually specifying resources and collecting high-quality data on specific domains, which significantly consume time and effort. To address this limitation, we propose an efficient data collection method~Query of CC based on large language models. This method bootstraps seed information through a large language model and retrieves related data from public corpora. It not only collects knowledge-related data for specific domains but unearths the data with potential reasoning procedures. Through the application of this method, we have curated a high-quality dataset called~Knowledge Pile, encompassing four major domains, including stem and humanities sciences, among others. Experimental results demonstrate that~Knowledge Pile significantly improves the performance of large language models in mathematical and knowledge-related reasoning ability tests. To facilitate academic sharing, we open-source our dataset and code, providing valuable support to the academic community.
Decay No More: A Persistent Twitter Dataset for Learning Social Meaning
With the proliferation of social media, many studies resort to social media to construct datasets for developing social meaning understanding systems. For the popular case of Twitter, most researchers distribute tweet IDs without the actual text contents due to the data distribution policy of the platform. One issue is that the posts become increasingly inaccessible over time, which leads to unfair comparisons and a temporal bias in social media research. To alleviate this challenge of data decay, we leverage a paraphrase model to propose a new persistent English Twitter dataset for social meaning (PTSM). PTSM consists of 17 social meaning datasets in 10 categories of tasks. We experiment with two SOTA pre-trained language models and show that our PTSM can substitute the actual tweets with paraphrases with marginal performance loss.
ToTTo: A Controlled Table-To-Text Generation Dataset
We present ToTTo, an open-domain English table-to-text dataset with over 120,000 training examples that proposes a controlled generation task: given a Wikipedia table and a set of highlighted table cells, produce a one-sentence description. To obtain generated targets that are natural but also faithful to the source table, we introduce a dataset construction process where annotators directly revise existing candidate sentences from Wikipedia. We present systematic analyses of our dataset and annotation process as well as results achieved by several state-of-the-art baselines. While usually fluent, existing methods often hallucinate phrases that are not supported by the table, suggesting that this dataset can serve as a useful research benchmark for high-precision conditional text generation.
Learning Word Vectors for 157 Languages
Distributed word representations, or word vectors, have recently been applied to many tasks in natural language processing, leading to state-of-the-art performance. A key ingredient to the successful application of these representations is to train them on very large corpora, and use these pre-trained models in downstream tasks. In this paper, we describe how we trained such high quality word representations for 157 languages. We used two sources of data to train these models: the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia and data from the common crawl project. We also introduce three new word analogy datasets to evaluate these word vectors, for French, Hindi and Polish. Finally, we evaluate our pre-trained word vectors on 10 languages for which evaluation datasets exists, showing very strong performance compared to previous models.
Samanantar: The Largest Publicly Available Parallel Corpora Collection for 11 Indic Languages
We present Samanantar, the largest publicly available parallel corpora collection for Indic languages. The collection contains a total of 49.7 million sentence pairs between English and 11 Indic languages (from two language families). Specifically, we compile 12.4 million sentence pairs from existing, publicly-available parallel corpora, and additionally mine 37.4 million sentence pairs from the web, resulting in a 4x increase. We mine the parallel sentences from the web by combining many corpora, tools, and methods: (a) web-crawled monolingual corpora, (b) document OCR for extracting sentences from scanned documents, (c) multilingual representation models for aligning sentences, and (d) approximate nearest neighbor search for searching in a large collection of sentences. Human evaluation of samples from the newly mined corpora validate the high quality of the parallel sentences across 11 languages. Further, we extract 83.4 million sentence pairs between all 55 Indic language pairs from the English-centric parallel corpus using English as the pivot language. We trained multilingual NMT models spanning all these languages on Samanantar, which outperform existing models and baselines on publicly available benchmarks, such as FLORES, establishing the utility of Samanantar. Our data and models are available publicly at https://indicnlp.ai4bharat.org/samanantar/ and we hope they will help advance research in NMT and multilingual NLP for Indic languages.
Chinese Fine-Grained Financial Sentiment Analysis with Large Language Models
Entity-level fine-grained sentiment analysis in the financial domain is a crucial subtask of sentiment analysis and currently faces numerous challenges. The primary challenge stems from the lack of high-quality and large-scale annotated corpora specifically designed for financial text sentiment analysis, which in turn limits the availability of data necessary for developing effective text processing techniques. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have yielded remarkable performance in natural language processing tasks, primarily centered around language pattern matching. In this paper, we propose a novel and extensive Chinese fine-grained financial sentiment analysis dataset, FinChina SA, for enterprise early warning. We thoroughly evaluate and experiment with well-known existing open-source LLMs using our dataset. We firmly believe that our dataset will serve as a valuable resource to advance the exploration of real-world financial sentiment analysis tasks, which should be the focus of future research. The FinChina SA dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/YerayL/FinChina-SA
DART: Open-Domain Structured Data Record to Text Generation
We present DART, an open domain structured DAta Record to Text generation dataset with over 82k instances (DARTs). Data-to-Text annotations can be a costly process, especially when dealing with tables which are the major source of structured data and contain nontrivial structures. To this end, we propose a procedure of extracting semantic triples from tables that encodes their structures by exploiting the semantic dependencies among table headers and the table title. Our dataset construction framework effectively merged heterogeneous sources from open domain semantic parsing and dialogue-act-based meaning representation tasks by utilizing techniques such as: tree ontology annotation, question-answer pair to declarative sentence conversion, and predicate unification, all with minimum post-editing. We present systematic evaluation on DART as well as new state-of-the-art results on WebNLG 2017 to show that DART (1) poses new challenges to existing data-to-text datasets and (2) facilitates out-of-domain generalization. Our data and code can be found at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/dart.
The Data Provenance Initiative: A Large Scale Audit of Dataset Licensing & Attribution in AI
The race to train language models on vast, diverse, and inconsistently documented datasets has raised pressing concerns about the legal and ethical risks for practitioners. To remedy these practices threatening data transparency and understanding, we convene a multi-disciplinary effort between legal and machine learning experts to systematically audit and trace 1800+ text datasets. We develop tools and standards to trace the lineage of these datasets, from their source, creators, series of license conditions, properties, and subsequent use. Our landscape analysis highlights the sharp divides in composition and focus of commercially open vs closed datasets, with closed datasets monopolizing important categories: lower resource languages, more creative tasks, richer topic variety, newer and more synthetic training data. This points to a deepening divide in the types of data that are made available under different license conditions, and heightened implications for jurisdictional legal interpretations of copyright and fair use. We also observe frequent miscategorization of licenses on widely used dataset hosting sites, with license omission of 72%+ and error rates of 50%+. This points to a crisis in misattribution and informed use of the most popular datasets driving many recent breakthroughs. As a contribution to ongoing improvements in dataset transparency and responsible use, we release our entire audit, with an interactive UI, the Data Provenance Explorer, which allows practitioners to trace and filter on data provenance for the most popular open source finetuning data collections: www.dataprovenance.org.
CCNet: Extracting High Quality Monolingual Datasets from Web Crawl Data
Pre-training text representations have led to significant improvements in many areas of natural language processing. The quality of these models benefits greatly from the size of the pretraining corpora as long as its quality is preserved. In this paper, we describe an automatic pipeline to extract massive high-quality monolingual datasets from Common Crawl for a variety of languages. Our pipeline follows the data processing introduced in fastText (Mikolov et al., 2017; Grave et al., 2018), that deduplicates documents and identifies their language. We augment this pipeline with a filtering step to select documents that are close to high quality corpora like Wikipedia.
A Survey on Data Selection for Language Models
A major factor in the recent success of large language models is the use of enormous and ever-growing text datasets for unsupervised pre-training. However, naively training a model on all available data may not be optimal (or feasible), as the quality of available text data can vary. Filtering out data can also decrease the carbon footprint and financial costs of training models by reducing the amount of training required. Data selection methods aim to determine which candidate data points to include in the training dataset and how to appropriately sample from the selected data points. The promise of improved data selection methods has caused the volume of research in the area to rapidly expand. However, because deep learning is mostly driven by empirical evidence and experimentation on large-scale data is expensive, few organizations have the resources for extensive data selection research. Consequently, knowledge of effective data selection practices has become concentrated within a few organizations, many of which do not openly share their findings and methodologies. To narrow this gap in knowledge, we present a comprehensive review of existing literature on data selection methods and related research areas, providing a taxonomy of existing approaches. By describing the current landscape of research, this work aims to accelerate progress in data selection by establishing an entry point for new and established researchers. Additionally, throughout this review we draw attention to noticeable holes in the literature and conclude the paper by proposing promising avenues for future research.
Automatically Annotated Turkish Corpus for Named Entity Recognition and Text Categorization using Large-Scale Gazetteers
Turkish Wikipedia Named-Entity Recognition and Text Categorization (TWNERTC) dataset is a collection of automatically categorized and annotated sentences obtained from Wikipedia. We constructed large-scale gazetteers by using a graph crawler algorithm to extract relevant entity and domain information from a semantic knowledge base, Freebase. The constructed gazetteers contains approximately 300K entities with thousands of fine-grained entity types under 77 different domains. Since automated processes are prone to ambiguity, we also introduce two new content specific noise reduction methodologies. Moreover, we map fine-grained entity types to the equivalent four coarse-grained types: person, loc, org, misc. Eventually, we construct six different dataset versions and evaluate the quality of annotations by comparing ground truths from human annotators. We make these datasets publicly available to support studies on Turkish named-entity recognition (NER) and text categorization (TC).
Neural Code Search Evaluation Dataset
There has been an increase of interest in code search using natural language. Assessing the performance of such code search models can be difficult without a readily available evaluation suite. In this paper, we present an evaluation dataset consisting of natural language query and code snippet pairs, with the hope that future work in this area can use this dataset as a common benchmark. We also provide the results of two code search models ([1] and [6]) from recent work. The evaluation dataset is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/Neural-Code-Search-Evaluation-Dataset
Shopping Queries Dataset: A Large-Scale ESCI Benchmark for Improving Product Search
Improving the quality of search results can significantly enhance users experience and engagement with search engines. In spite of several recent advancements in the fields of machine learning and data mining, correctly classifying items for a particular user search query has been a long-standing challenge, which still has a large room for improvement. This paper introduces the "Shopping Queries Dataset", a large dataset of difficult Amazon search queries and results, publicly released with the aim of fostering research in improving the quality of search results. The dataset contains around 130 thousand unique queries and 2.6 million manually labeled (query,product) relevance judgements. The dataset is multilingual with queries in English, Japanese, and Spanish. The Shopping Queries Dataset is being used in one of the KDDCup'22 challenges. In this paper, we describe the dataset and present three evaluation tasks along with baseline results: (i) ranking the results list, (ii) classifying product results into relevance categories, and (iii) identifying substitute products for a given query. We anticipate that this data will become the gold standard for future research in the topic of product search.
Understanding the User: An Intent-Based Ranking Dataset
As information retrieval systems continue to evolve, accurate evaluation and benchmarking of these systems become pivotal. Web search datasets, such as MS MARCO, primarily provide short keyword queries without accompanying intent or descriptions, posing a challenge in comprehending the underlying information need. This paper proposes an approach to augmenting such datasets to annotate informative query descriptions, with a focus on two prominent benchmark datasets: TREC-DL-21 and TREC-DL-22. Our methodology involves utilizing state-of-the-art LLMs to analyze and comprehend the implicit intent within individual queries from benchmark datasets. By extracting key semantic elements, we construct detailed and contextually rich descriptions for these queries. To validate the generated query descriptions, we employ crowdsourcing as a reliable means of obtaining diverse human perspectives on the accuracy and informativeness of the descriptions. This information can be used as an evaluation set for tasks such as ranking, query rewriting, or others.
An Amharic News Text classification Dataset
In NLP, text classification is one of the primary problems we try to solve and its uses in language analyses are indisputable. The lack of labeled training data made it harder to do these tasks in low resource languages like Amharic. The task of collecting, labeling, annotating, and making valuable this kind of data will encourage junior researchers, schools, and machine learning practitioners to implement existing classification models in their language. In this short paper, we aim to introduce the Amharic text classification dataset that consists of more than 50k news articles that were categorized into 6 classes. This dataset is made available with easy baseline performances to encourage studies and better performance experiments.
CSDR-BERT: a pre-trained scientific dataset match model for Chinese Scientific Dataset Retrieval
As the number of open and shared scientific datasets on the Internet increases under the open science movement, efficiently retrieving these datasets is a crucial task in information retrieval (IR) research. In recent years, the development of large models, particularly the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm, which involves pre-training on large models and fine-tuning on downstream tasks, has provided new solutions for IR match tasks. In this study, we use the original BERT token in the embedding layer, improve the Sentence-BERT model structure in the model layer by introducing the SimCSE and K-Nearest Neighbors method, and use the cosent loss function in the optimization phase to optimize the target output. Our experimental results show that our model outperforms other competing models on both public and self-built datasets through comparative experiments and ablation implementations. This study explores and validates the feasibility and efficiency of pre-training techniques for semantic retrieval of Chinese scientific datasets.
KPTimes: A Large-Scale Dataset for Keyphrase Generation on News Documents
Keyphrase generation is the task of predicting a set of lexical units that conveys the main content of a source text. Existing datasets for keyphrase generation are only readily available for the scholarly domain and include non-expert annotations. In this paper we present KPTimes, a large-scale dataset of news texts paired with editor-curated keyphrases. Exploring the dataset, we show how editors tag documents, and how their annotations differ from those found in existing datasets. We also train and evaluate state-of-the-art neural keyphrase generation models on KPTimes to gain insights on how well they perform on the news domain. The dataset is available online at https://github.com/ygorg/KPTimes .
Alloprof: a new French question-answer education dataset and its use in an information retrieval case study
Teachers and students are increasingly relying on online learning resources to supplement the ones provided in school. This increase in the breadth and depth of available resources is a great thing for students, but only provided they are able to find answers to their queries. Question-answering and information retrieval systems have benefited from public datasets to train and evaluate their algorithms, but most of these datasets have been in English text written by and for adults. We introduce a new public French question-answering dataset collected from Alloprof, a Quebec-based primary and high-school help website, containing 29 349 questions and their explanations in a variety of school subjects from 10 368 students, with more than half of the explanations containing links to other questions or some of the 2 596 reference pages on the website. We also present a case study of this dataset in an information retrieval task. This dataset was collected on the Alloprof public forum, with all questions verified for their appropriateness and the explanations verified both for their appropriateness and their relevance to the question. To predict relevant documents, architectures using pre-trained BERT models were fine-tuned and evaluated. This dataset will allow researchers to develop question-answering, information retrieval and other algorithms specifically for the French speaking education context. Furthermore, the range of language proficiency, images, mathematical symbols and spelling mistakes will necessitate algorithms based on a multimodal comprehension. The case study we present as a baseline shows an approach that relies on recent techniques provides an acceptable performance level, but more work is necessary before it can reliably be used and trusted in a production setting.
WikiDes: A Wikipedia-Based Dataset for Generating Short Descriptions from Paragraphs
As free online encyclopedias with massive volumes of content, Wikipedia and Wikidata are key to many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as information retrieval, knowledge base building, machine translation, text classification, and text summarization. In this paper, we introduce WikiDes, a novel dataset to generate short descriptions of Wikipedia articles for the problem of text summarization. The dataset consists of over 80k English samples on 6987 topics. We set up a two-phase summarization method - description generation (Phase I) and candidate ranking (Phase II) - as a strong approach that relies on transfer and contrastive learning. For description generation, T5 and BART show their superiority compared to other small-scale pre-trained models. By applying contrastive learning with the diverse input from beam search, the metric fusion-based ranking models outperform the direct description generation models significantly up to 22 ROUGE in topic-exclusive split and topic-independent split. Furthermore, the outcome descriptions in Phase II are supported by human evaluation in over 45.33% chosen compared to 23.66% in Phase I against the gold descriptions. In the aspect of sentiment analysis, the generated descriptions cannot effectively capture all sentiment polarities from paragraphs while doing this task better from the gold descriptions. The automatic generation of new descriptions reduces the human efforts in creating them and enriches Wikidata-based knowledge graphs. Our paper shows a practical impact on Wikipedia and Wikidata since there are thousands of missing descriptions. Finally, we expect WikiDes to be a useful dataset for related works in capturing salient information from short paragraphs. The curated dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/declare-lab/WikiDes.
Evaluating D-MERIT of Partial-annotation on Information Retrieval
Retrieval models are often evaluated on partially-annotated datasets. Each query is mapped to a few relevant texts and the remaining corpus is assumed to be irrelevant. As a result, models that successfully retrieve false negatives are punished in evaluation. Unfortunately, completely annotating all texts for every query is not resource efficient. In this work, we show that using partially-annotated datasets in evaluation can paint a distorted picture. We curate D-MERIT, a passage retrieval evaluation set from Wikipedia, aspiring to contain all relevant passages for each query. Queries describe a group (e.g., ``journals about linguistics'') and relevant passages are evidence that entities belong to the group (e.g., a passage indicating that Language is a journal about linguistics). We show that evaluating on a dataset containing annotations for only a subset of the relevant passages might result in misleading ranking of the retrieval systems and that as more relevant texts are included in the evaluation set, the rankings converge. We propose our dataset as a resource for evaluation and our study as a recommendation for balance between resource-efficiency and reliable evaluation when annotating evaluation sets for text retrieval.
Zero- and Few-Shot Prompting with LLMs: A Comparative Study with Fine-tuned Models for Bangla Sentiment Analysis
The rapid expansion of the digital world has propelled sentiment analysis into a critical tool across diverse sectors such as marketing, politics, customer service, and healthcare. While there have been significant advancements in sentiment analysis for widely spoken languages, low-resource languages, such as Bangla, remain largely under-researched due to resource constraints. Furthermore, the recent unprecedented performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various applications highlights the need to evaluate them in the context of low-resource languages. In this study, we present a sizeable manually annotated dataset encompassing 33,605 Bangla news tweets and Facebook comments. We also investigate zero- and few-shot in-context learning with several language models, including Flan-T5, GPT-4, and Bloomz, offering a comparative analysis against fine-tuned models. Our findings suggest that monolingual transformer-based models consistently outperform other models, even in zero and few-shot scenarios. To foster continued exploration, we intend to make this dataset and our research tools publicly available to the broader research community. In the spirit of further research, we plan to make this dataset and our experimental resources publicly accessible to the wider research community.
Quati: A Brazilian Portuguese Information Retrieval Dataset from Native Speakers
Despite Portuguese being one of the most spoken languages in the world, there is a lack of high-quality information retrieval datasets in that language. We present Quati, a dataset specifically designed for the Brazilian Portuguese language. It comprises a collection of queries formulated by native speakers and a curated set of documents sourced from a selection of high-quality Brazilian Portuguese websites. These websites are frequented more likely by real users compared to those randomly scraped, ensuring a more representative and relevant corpus. To label the query-document pairs, we use a state-of-the-art LLM, which shows inter-annotator agreement levels comparable to human performance in our assessments. We provide a detailed description of our annotation methodology to enable others to create similar datasets for other languages, providing a cost-effective way of creating high-quality IR datasets with an arbitrary number of labeled documents per query. Finally, we evaluate a diverse range of open-source and commercial retrievers to serve as baseline systems. Quati is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/unicamp-dl/quati and all scripts at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/quati .
Data, Data Everywhere: A Guide for Pretraining Dataset Construction
The impressive capabilities of recent language models can be largely attributed to the multi-trillion token pretraining datasets that they are trained on. However, model developers fail to disclose their construction methodology which has lead to a lack of open information on how to develop effective pretraining sets. To address this issue, we perform the first systematic study across the entire pipeline of pretraining set construction. First, we run ablations on existing techniques for pretraining set development to identify which methods translate to the largest gains in model accuracy on downstream evaluations. Then, we categorize the most widely used data source, web crawl snapshots, across the attributes of toxicity, quality, type of speech, and domain. Finally, we show how such attribute information can be used to further refine and improve the quality of a pretraining set. These findings constitute an actionable set of steps that practitioners can use to develop high quality pretraining sets.
Q_{bias} -- A Dataset on Media Bias in Search Queries and Query Suggestions
This publication describes the motivation and generation of Q_{bias}, a large dataset of Google and Bing search queries, a scraping tool and dataset for biased news articles, as well as language models for the investigation of bias in online search. Web search engines are a major factor and trusted source in information search, especially in the political domain. However, biased information can influence opinion formation and lead to biased opinions. To interact with search engines, users formulate search queries and interact with search query suggestions provided by the search engines. A lack of datasets on search queries inhibits research on the subject. We use Q_{bias} to evaluate different approaches to fine-tuning transformer-based language models with the goal of producing models capable of biasing text with left and right political stance. Additionally to this work we provided datasets and language models for biasing texts that allow further research on bias in online information search.
S2ORC: The Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus
We introduce S2ORC, a large corpus of 81.1M English-language academic papers spanning many academic disciplines. The corpus consists of rich metadata, paper abstracts, resolved bibliographic references, as well as structured full text for 8.1M open access papers. Full text is annotated with automatically-detected inline mentions of citations, figures, and tables, each linked to their corresponding paper objects. In S2ORC, we aggregate papers from hundreds of academic publishers and digital archives into a unified source, and create the largest publicly-available collection of machine-readable academic text to date. We hope this resource will facilitate research and development of tools and tasks for text mining over academic text.
Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task
We present Spider, a large-scale, complex and cross-domain semantic parsing and text-to-SQL dataset annotated by 11 college students. It consists of 10,181 questions and 5,693 unique complex SQL queries on 200 databases with multiple tables, covering 138 different domains. We define a new complex and cross-domain semantic parsing and text-to-SQL task where different complex SQL queries and databases appear in train and test sets. In this way, the task requires the model to generalize well to both new SQL queries and new database schemas. Spider is distinct from most of the previous semantic parsing tasks because they all use a single database and the exact same programs in the train set and the test set. We experiment with various state-of-the-art models and the best model achieves only 12.4% exact matching accuracy on a database split setting. This shows that Spider presents a strong challenge for future research. Our dataset and task are publicly available at https://yale-lily.github.io/spider
Cleaner Pretraining Corpus Curation with Neural Web Scraping
The web contains large-scale, diverse, and abundant information to satisfy the information-seeking needs of humans. Through meticulous data collection, preprocessing, and curation, webpages can be used as a fundamental data resource for language model pretraining. However, when confronted with the progressively revolutionized and intricate nature of webpages, rule-based/feature-based web scrapers are becoming increasingly inadequate. This paper presents a simple, fast, and effective Neural web Scraper (NeuScraper) to help extract primary and clean text contents from webpages. Experimental results show that NeuScraper surpasses the baseline scrapers by achieving more than a 20% improvement, demonstrating its potential in extracting higher-quality data to facilitate the language model pretraining. All of the code is available at https://github.com/OpenMatch/NeuScraper.
A New Massive Multilingual Dataset for High-Performance Language Technologies
We present the HPLT (High Performance Language Technologies) language resources, a new massive multilingual dataset including both monolingual and bilingual corpora extracted from CommonCrawl and previously unused web crawls from the Internet Archive. We describe our methods for data acquisition, management and processing of large corpora, which rely on open-source software tools and high-performance computing. Our monolingual collection focuses on low- to medium-resourced languages and covers 75 languages and a total of ~5.6 trillion word tokens de-duplicated on the document level. Our English-centric parallel corpus is derived from its monolingual counterpart and covers 18 language pairs and more than 96 million aligned sentence pairs with roughly 1.4 billion English tokens. The HPLT language resources are one of the largest open text corpora ever released, providing a great resource for language modeling and machine translation training. We publicly release the corpora, the software, and the tools used in this work.
Dense Text Retrieval based on Pretrained Language Models: A Survey
Text retrieval is a long-standing research topic on information seeking, where a system is required to return relevant information resources to user's queries in natural language. From classic retrieval methods to learning-based ranking functions, the underlying retrieval models have been continually evolved with the ever-lasting technical innovation. To design effective retrieval models, a key point lies in how to learn the text representation and model the relevance matching. The recent success of pretrained language models (PLMs) sheds light on developing more capable text retrieval approaches by leveraging the excellent modeling capacity of PLMs. With powerful PLMs, we can effectively learn the representations of queries and texts in the latent representation space, and further construct the semantic matching function between the dense vectors for relevance modeling. Such a retrieval approach is referred to as dense retrieval, since it employs dense vectors (a.k.a., embeddings) to represent the texts. Considering the rapid progress on dense retrieval, in this survey, we systematically review the recent advances on PLM-based dense retrieval. Different from previous surveys on dense retrieval, we take a new perspective to organize the related work by four major aspects, including architecture, training, indexing and integration, and summarize the mainstream techniques for each aspect. We thoroughly survey the literature, and include 300+ related reference papers on dense retrieval. To support our survey, we create a website for providing useful resources, and release a code repertory and toolkit for implementing dense retrieval models. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive, practical reference focused on the major progress for dense text retrieval.
Copy Is All You Need
The dominant text generation models compose the output by sequentially selecting words from a fixed vocabulary. In this paper, we formulate text generation as progressively copying text segments (e.g., words or phrases) from an existing text collection. We compute the contextualized representations of meaningful text segments and index them using efficient vector search toolkits. The task of text generation is then decomposed into a series of copy-and-paste operations: at each time step, we seek suitable text spans from the text collection rather than selecting from a standalone vocabulary. Experiments on the standard language modeling benchmark (WikiText-103) show that our approach achieves better generation quality according to both automatic and human evaluations. Besides, its inference efficiency is comparable to token-level autoregressive models thanks to the reduction of decoding steps. We also show that our approach allows for effective domain adaptation by simply switching to domain-specific text collection without extra training. Finally, we observe that our approach attains additional performance gains by simply scaling up to larger text collections, again without further training.Our source codes are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/gmftbyGMFTBY/Copyisallyouneed.}
WanJuanSiLu: A High-Quality Open-Source Webtext Dataset for Low-Resource Languages
This paper introduces the open-source dataset WanJuanSiLu, designed to provide high-quality training corpora for low-resource languages, thereby advancing the research and development of multilingual models. To achieve this, we have developed a systematic data processing framework tailored for low-resource languages. This framework encompasses key stages such as data extraction, corpus cleaning, content deduplication, security filtering, quality evaluation, and theme classification. Through the implementation of this framework, we have significantly improved both the quality and security of the dataset, while maintaining its linguistic diversity. As of now, data for all five languages have been fully open-sourced. The dataset can be accessed at https://opendatalab.com/applyMultilingualCorpus, and GitHub repository is available at https://github.com/opendatalab/WanJuan3.0
FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification
In this paper we introduce a new publicly available dataset for verification against textual sources, FEVER: Fact Extraction and VERification. It consists of 185,445 claims generated by altering sentences extracted from Wikipedia and subsequently verified without knowledge of the sentence they were derived from. The claims are classified as Supported, Refuted or NotEnoughInfo by annotators achieving 0.6841 in Fleiss kappa. For the first two classes, the annotators also recorded the sentence(s) forming the necessary evidence for their judgment. To characterize the challenge of the dataset presented, we develop a pipeline approach and compare it to suitably designed oracles. The best accuracy we achieve on labeling a claim accompanied by the correct evidence is 31.87%, while if we ignore the evidence we achieve 50.91%. Thus we believe that FEVER is a challenging testbed that will help stimulate progress on claim verification against textual sources.
Neural Natural Language Processing for Long Texts: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art
The adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has greatly benefited Natural Language Processing (NLP) during the past decade. However, the demands of long document analysis are quite different from those of shorter texts, while the ever increasing size of documents uploaded on-line renders automated understanding of lengthy texts a critical issue. Relevant applications include automated Web mining, legal document review, medical records analysis, financial reports analysis, contract management, environmental impact assessment, news aggregation, etc. Despite the relatively recent development of efficient algorithms for analyzing long documents, practical tools in this field are currently flourishing. This article serves as an entry point into this dynamic domain and aims to achieve two objectives. Firstly, it provides an overview of the relevant neural building blocks, serving as a concise tutorial for the field. Secondly, it offers a brief examination of the current state-of-the-art in long document NLP, with a primary focus on two key tasks: document classification and document summarization. Sentiment analysis for long texts is also covered, since it is typically treated as a particular case of document classification. Consequently, this article presents an introductory exploration of document-level analysis, addressing the primary challenges, concerns, and existing solutions. Finally, the article presents publicly available annotated datasets that can facilitate further research in this area.
QUEST: A Retrieval Dataset of Entity-Seeking Queries with Implicit Set Operations
Formulating selective information needs results in queries that implicitly specify set operations, such as intersection, union, and difference. For instance, one might search for "shorebirds that are not sandpipers" or "science-fiction films shot in England". To study the ability of retrieval systems to meet such information needs, we construct QUEST, a dataset of 3357 natural language queries with implicit set operations, that map to a set of entities corresponding to Wikipedia documents. The dataset challenges models to match multiple constraints mentioned in queries with corresponding evidence in documents and correctly perform various set operations. The dataset is constructed semi-automatically using Wikipedia category names. Queries are automatically composed from individual categories, then paraphrased and further validated for naturalness and fluency by crowdworkers. Crowdworkers also assess the relevance of entities based on their documents and highlight attribution of query constraints to spans of document text. We analyze several modern retrieval systems, finding that they often struggle on such queries. Queries involving negation and conjunction are particularly challenging and systems are further challenged with combinations of these operations.
LegalLens: Leveraging LLMs for Legal Violation Identification in Unstructured Text
In this study, we focus on two main tasks, the first for detecting legal violations within unstructured textual data, and the second for associating these violations with potentially affected individuals. We constructed two datasets using Large Language Models (LLMs) which were subsequently validated by domain expert annotators. Both tasks were designed specifically for the context of class-action cases. The experimental design incorporated fine-tuning models from the BERT family and open-source LLMs, and conducting few-shot experiments using closed-source LLMs. Our results, with an F1-score of 62.69\% (violation identification) and 81.02\% (associating victims), show that our datasets and setups can be used for both tasks. Finally, we publicly release the datasets and the code used for the experiments in order to advance further research in the area of legal natural language processing (NLP).
Addressing "Documentation Debt" in Machine Learning Research: A Retrospective Datasheet for BookCorpus
Recent literature has underscored the importance of dataset documentation work for machine learning, and part of this work involves addressing "documentation debt" for datasets that have been used widely but documented sparsely. This paper aims to help address documentation debt for BookCorpus, a popular text dataset for training large language models. Notably, researchers have used BookCorpus to train OpenAI's GPT-N models and Google's BERT models, even though little to no documentation exists about the dataset's motivation, composition, collection process, etc. We offer a preliminary datasheet that provides key context and information about BookCorpus, highlighting several notable deficiencies. In particular, we find evidence that (1) BookCorpus likely violates copyright restrictions for many books, (2) BookCorpus contains thousands of duplicated books, and (3) BookCorpus exhibits significant skews in genre representation. We also find hints of other potential deficiencies that call for future research, including problematic content, potential skews in religious representation, and lopsided author contributions. While more work remains, this initial effort to provide a datasheet for BookCorpus adds to growing literature that urges more careful and systematic documentation for machine learning datasets.
AIMS.au: A Dataset for the Analysis of Modern Slavery Countermeasures in Corporate Statements
Despite over a decade of legislative efforts to address modern slavery in the supply chains of large corporations, the effectiveness of government oversight remains hampered by the challenge of scrutinizing thousands of statements annually. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can be considered a well established solution for the automatic analysis and summarization of documents, recognizing concrete modern slavery countermeasures taken by companies and differentiating those from vague claims remains a challenging task. To help evaluate and fine-tune LLMs for the assessment of corporate statements, we introduce a dataset composed of 5,731 modern slavery statements taken from the Australian Modern Slavery Register and annotated at the sentence level. This paper details the construction steps for the dataset that include the careful design of annotation specifications, the selection and preprocessing of statements, and the creation of high-quality annotation subsets for effective model evaluations. To demonstrate our dataset's utility, we propose a machine learning methodology for the detection of sentences relevant to mandatory reporting requirements set by the Australian Modern Slavery Act. We then follow this methodology to benchmark modern language models under zero-shot and supervised learning settings.
Learning Semantic Correspondences in Technical Documentation
We consider the problem of translating high-level textual descriptions to formal representations in technical documentation as part of an effort to model the meaning of such documentation. We focus specifically on the problem of learning translational correspondences between text descriptions and grounded representations in the target documentation, such as formal representation of functions or code templates. Our approach exploits the parallel nature of such documentation, or the tight coupling between high-level text and the low-level representations we aim to learn. Data is collected by mining technical documents for such parallel text-representation pairs, which we use to train a simple semantic parsing model. We report new baseline results on sixteen novel datasets, including the standard library documentation for nine popular programming languages across seven natural languages, and a small collection of Unix utility manuals.
The Code2Text Challenge: Text Generation in Source Code Libraries
We propose a new shared task for tactical data-to-text generation in the domain of source code libraries. Specifically, we focus on text generation of function descriptions from example software projects. Data is drawn from existing resources used for studying the related problem of semantic parser induction (Richardson and Kuhn, 2017b; Richardson and Kuhn, 2017a), and spans a wide variety of both natural languages and programming languages. In this paper, we describe these existing resources, which will serve as training and development data for the task, and discuss plans for building new independent test sets.
What's in the Box? A Preliminary Analysis of Undesirable Content in the Common Crawl Corpus
Whereas much of the success of the current generation of neural language models has been driven by increasingly large training corpora, relatively little research has been dedicated to analyzing these massive sources of textual data. In this exploratory analysis, we delve deeper into the Common Crawl, a colossal web corpus that is extensively used for training language models. We find that it contains a significant amount of undesirable content, including hate speech and sexually explicit content, even after filtering procedures. We discuss the potential impacts of this content on language models and conclude with future research directions and a more mindful approach to corpus collection and analysis.
Newswire: A Large-Scale Structured Database of a Century of Historical News
In the U.S. historically, local newspapers drew their content largely from newswires like the Associated Press. Historians argue that newswires played a pivotal role in creating a national identity and shared understanding of the world, but there is no comprehensive archive of the content sent over newswires. We reconstruct such an archive by applying a customized deep learning pipeline to hundreds of terabytes of raw image scans from thousands of local newspapers. The resulting dataset contains 2.7 million unique public domain U.S. newswire articles, written between 1878 and 1977. Locations in these articles are georeferenced, topics are tagged using customized neural topic classification, named entities are recognized, and individuals are disambiguated to Wikipedia using a novel entity disambiguation model. To construct the Newswire dataset, we first recognize newspaper layouts and transcribe around 138 millions structured article texts from raw image scans. We then use a customized neural bi-encoder model to de-duplicate reproduced articles, in the presence of considerable abridgement and noise, quantifying how widely each article was reproduced. A text classifier is used to ensure that we only include newswire articles, which historically are in the public domain. The structured data that accompany the texts provide rich information about the who (disambiguated individuals), what (topics), and where (georeferencing) of the news that millions of Americans read over the course of a century. We also include Library of Congress metadata information about the newspapers that ran the articles on their front pages. The Newswire dataset is useful both for large language modeling - expanding training data beyond what is available from modern web texts - and for studying a diversity of questions in computational linguistics, social science, and the digital humanities.
Adaptive Two-Phase Finetuning LLMs for Japanese Legal Text Retrieval
Text Retrieval (TR) involves finding and retrieving text-based content relevant to a user's query from a large repository, with applications in real-world scenarios such as legal document retrieval. While most existing studies focus on English, limited work addresses Japanese contexts. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset specifically designed for Japanese legal contexts and propose a novel two-phase pipeline tailored to this domain. In the first phase, the model learns a broad understanding of global contexts, enhancing its generalization and adaptability to diverse queries. In the second phase, the model is fine-tuned to address complex queries specific to legal scenarios. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of our method, which outperforms existing baselines. Furthermore, our pipeline proves effective in English contexts, surpassing comparable baselines on the MS MARCO dataset. We have made our code publicly available on GitHub, and the model checkpoints are accessible via HuggingFace.
SciNews: From Scholarly Complexities to Public Narratives -- A Dataset for Scientific News Report Generation
Scientific news reports serve as a bridge, adeptly translating complex research articles into reports that resonate with the broader public. The automated generation of such narratives enhances the accessibility of scholarly insights. In this paper, we present a new corpus to facilitate this paradigm development. Our corpus comprises a parallel compilation of academic publications and their corresponding scientific news reports across nine disciplines. To demonstrate the utility and reliability of our dataset, we conduct an extensive analysis, highlighting the divergences in readability and brevity between scientific news narratives and academic manuscripts. We benchmark our dataset employing state-of-the-art text generation models. The evaluation process involves both automatic and human evaluation, which lays the groundwork for future explorations into the automated generation of scientific news reports. The dataset and code related to this work are available at https://dongqi.me/projects/SciNews.
TLDR9+: A Large Scale Resource for Extreme Summarization of Social Media Posts
Recent models in developing summarization systems consist of millions of parameters and the model performance is highly dependent on the abundance of training data. While most existing summarization corpora contain data in the order of thousands to one million, generation of large-scale summarization datasets in order of couple of millions is yet to be explored. Practically, more data is better at generalizing the training patterns to unseen data. In this paper, we introduce TLDR9+ -- a large-scale summarization dataset -- containing over 9 million training instances extracted from Reddit discussion forum (https://github.com/sajastu/reddit_collector). This dataset is specifically gathered to perform extreme summarization (i.e., generating one-sentence summary in high compression and abstraction) and is more than twice larger than the previously proposed dataset. We go one step further and with the help of human annotations, we distill a more fine-grained dataset by sampling High-Quality instances from TLDR9+ and call it TLDRHQ dataset. We further pinpoint different state-of-the-art summarization models on our proposed datasets.
Improving Keyphrase Extraction with Data Augmentation and Information Filtering
Keyphrase extraction is one of the essential tasks for document understanding in NLP. While the majority of the prior works are dedicated to the formal setting, e.g., books, news or web-blogs, informal texts such as video transcripts are less explored. To address this limitation, in this work we present a novel corpus and method for keyphrase extraction from the transcripts of the videos streamed on the Behance platform. More specifically, in this work, a novel data augmentation is proposed to enrich the model with the background knowledge about the keyphrase extraction task from other domains. Extensive experiments on the proposed dataset dataset show the effectiveness of the introduced method.
WebSRC: A Dataset for Web-Based Structural Reading Comprehension
Web search is an essential way for humans to obtain information, but it's still a great challenge for machines to understand the contents of web pages. In this paper, we introduce the task of structural reading comprehension (SRC) on web. Given a web page and a question about it, the task is to find the answer from the web page. This task requires a system not only to understand the semantics of texts but also the structure of the web page. Moreover, we proposed WebSRC, a novel Web-based Structural Reading Comprehension dataset. WebSRC consists of 400K question-answer pairs, which are collected from 6.4K web pages. Along with the QA pairs, corresponding HTML source code, screenshots, and metadata are also provided in our dataset. Each question in WebSRC requires a certain structural understanding of a web page to answer, and the answer is either a text span on the web page or yes/no. We evaluate various baselines on our dataset to show the difficulty of our task. We also investigate the usefulness of structural information and visual features. Our dataset and baselines have been publicly available at https://x-lance.github.io/WebSRC/.
Ruri: Japanese General Text Embeddings
We report the development of Ruri, a series of Japanese general text embedding models. While the development of general-purpose text embedding models in English and multilingual contexts has been active in recent years, model development in Japanese remains insufficient. The primary reasons for this are the lack of datasets and the absence of necessary expertise. In this report, we provide a detailed account of the development process of Ruri. Specifically, we discuss the training of embedding models using synthesized datasets generated by LLMs, the construction of the reranker for dataset filtering and knowledge distillation, and the performance evaluation of the resulting general-purpose text embedding models.
On the State of German (Abstractive) Text Summarization
With recent advancements in the area of Natural Language Processing, the focus is slowly shifting from a purely English-centric view towards more language-specific solutions, including German. Especially practical for businesses to analyze their growing amount of textual data are text summarization systems, which transform long input documents into compressed and more digestible summary texts. In this work, we assess the particular landscape of German abstractive text summarization and investigate the reasons why practically useful solutions for abstractive text summarization are still absent in industry. Our focus is two-fold, analyzing a) training resources, and b) publicly available summarization systems. We are able to show that popular existing datasets exhibit crucial flaws in their assumptions about the original sources, which frequently leads to detrimental effects on system generalization and evaluation biases. We confirm that for the most popular training dataset, MLSUM, over 50% of the training set is unsuitable for abstractive summarization purposes. Furthermore, available systems frequently fail to compare to simple baselines, and ignore more effective and efficient extractive summarization approaches. We attribute poor evaluation quality to a variety of different factors, which are investigated in more detail in this work: A lack of qualitative (and diverse) gold data considered for training, understudied (and untreated) positional biases in some of the existing datasets, and the lack of easily accessible and streamlined pre-processing strategies or analysis tools. We provide a comprehensive assessment of available models on the cleaned datasets, and find that this can lead to a reduction of more than 20 ROUGE-1 points during evaluation. The code for dataset filtering and reproducing results can be found online at https://github.com/dennlinger/summaries
RoundTable: Leveraging Dynamic Schema and Contextual Autocomplete for Enhanced Query Precision in Tabular Question Answering
With advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), a major use case that has emerged is querying databases in plain English, translating user questions into executable database queries, which has improved significantly. However, real-world datasets often feature a vast array of attributes and complex values, complicating the LLMs task of accurately identifying relevant columns or values from natural language queries. Traditional methods cannot fully relay the datasets size and complexity to the LLM. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that leverages Full-Text Search (FTS) on the input table. This approach not only enables precise detection of specific values and columns but also narrows the search space for language models, thereby enhancing query accuracy. Additionally, it supports a custom auto-complete feature that suggests queries based on the data in the table. This integration significantly refines the interaction between the user and complex datasets, offering a sophisticated solution to the limitations faced by current table querying capabilities. This work is accompanied by an application for both Mac and Windows platforms, which readers can try out themselves on their own data.
CS-PaperSum: A Large-Scale Dataset of AI-Generated Summaries for Scientific Papers
The rapid expansion of scientific literature in computer science presents challenges in tracking research trends and extracting key insights. Existing datasets provide metadata but lack structured summaries that capture core contributions and methodologies. We introduce CS-PaperSum, a large-scale dataset of 91,919 papers from 31 top-tier computer science conferences, enriched with AI-generated structured summaries using ChatGPT. To assess summary quality, we conduct embedding alignment analysis and keyword overlap analysis, demonstrating strong preservation of key concepts. We further present a case study on AI research trends, highlighting shifts in methodologies and interdisciplinary crossovers, including the rise of self-supervised learning, retrieval-augmented generation, and multimodal AI. Our dataset enables automated literature analysis, research trend forecasting, and AI-driven scientific discovery, providing a valuable resource for researchers, policymakers, and scientific information retrieval systems.
The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling
Recent work has demonstrated that increased training dataset diversity improves general cross-domain knowledge and downstream generalization capability for large-scale language models. With this in mind, we present the Pile: an 825 GiB English text corpus targeted at training large-scale language models. The Pile is constructed from 22 diverse high-quality subsets -- both existing and newly constructed -- many of which derive from academic or professional sources. Our evaluation of the untuned performance of GPT-2 and GPT-3 on the Pile shows that these models struggle on many of its components, such as academic writing. Conversely, models trained on the Pile improve significantly over both Raw CC and CC-100 on all components of the Pile, while improving performance on downstream evaluations. Through an in-depth exploratory analysis, we document potentially concerning aspects of the data for prospective users. We make publicly available the code used in its construction.
A Massive Scale Semantic Similarity Dataset of Historical English
A diversity of tasks use language models trained on semantic similarity data. While there are a variety of datasets that capture semantic similarity, they are either constructed from modern web data or are relatively small datasets created in the past decade by human annotators. This study utilizes a novel source, newly digitized articles from off-copyright, local U.S. newspapers, to assemble a massive-scale semantic similarity dataset spanning 70 years from 1920 to 1989 and containing nearly 400M positive semantic similarity pairs. Historically, around half of articles in U.S. local newspapers came from newswires like the Associated Press. While local papers reproduced articles from the newswire, they wrote their own headlines, which form abstractive summaries of the associated articles. We associate articles and their headlines by exploiting document layouts and language understanding. We then use deep neural methods to detect which articles are from the same underlying source, in the presence of substantial noise and abridgement. The headlines of reproduced articles form positive semantic similarity pairs. The resulting publicly available HEADLINES dataset is significantly larger than most existing semantic similarity datasets and covers a much longer span of time. It will facilitate the application of contrastively trained semantic similarity models to a variety of tasks, including the study of semantic change across space and time.
PromptSet: A Programmer's Prompting Dataset
The rise of capabilities expressed by large language models has been quickly followed by the integration of the same complex systems into application level logic. Algorithms, programs, systems, and companies are built around structured prompting to black box models where the majority of the design and implementation lies in capturing and quantifying the `agent mode'. The standard way to shape a closed language model is to prime it for a specific task with a tailored prompt, often initially handwritten by a human. The textual prompts co-evolve with the codebase, taking shape over the course of project life as artifacts which must be reviewed and maintained, just as the traditional code files might be. Unlike traditional code, we find that prompts do not receive effective static testing and linting to prevent runtime issues. In this work, we present a novel dataset called PromptSet, with more than 61,000 unique developer prompts used in open source Python programs. We perform analysis on this dataset and introduce the notion of a static linter for prompts. Released with this publication is a HuggingFace dataset and a Github repository to recreate collection and processing efforts, both under the name pisterlabs/promptset.
Are AI Detectors Good Enough? A Survey on Quality of Datasets With Machine-Generated Texts
The rapid development of autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved the quality of generated texts, necessitating reliable machine-generated text detectors. A huge number of detectors and collections with AI fragments have emerged, and several detection methods even showed recognition quality up to 99.9% according to the target metrics in such collections. However, the quality of such detectors tends to drop dramatically in the wild, posing a question: Are detectors actually highly trustworthy or do their high benchmark scores come from the poor quality of evaluation datasets? In this paper, we emphasise the need for robust and qualitative methods for evaluating generated data to be secure against bias and low generalising ability of future model. We present a systematic review of datasets from competitions dedicated to AI-generated content detection and propose methods for evaluating the quality of datasets containing AI-generated fragments. In addition, we discuss the possibility of using high-quality generated data to achieve two goals: improving the training of detection models and improving the training datasets themselves. Our contribution aims to facilitate a better understanding of the dynamics between human and machine text, which will ultimately support the integrity of information in an increasingly automated world.
BanMANI: A Dataset to Identify Manipulated Social Media News in Bangla
Initial work has been done to address fake news detection and misrepresentation of news in the Bengali language. However, no work in Bengali yet addresses the identification of specific claims in social media news that falsely manipulates a related news article. At this point, this problem has been tackled in English and a few other languages, but not in the Bengali language. In this paper, we curate a dataset of social media content labeled with information manipulation relative to reference articles, called BanMANI. The dataset collection method we describe works around the limitations of the available NLP tools in Bangla. We expect these techniques will carry over to building similar datasets in other low-resource languages. BanMANI forms the basis both for evaluating the capabilities of existing NLP systems and for training or fine-tuning new models specifically on this task. In our analysis, we find that this task challenges current LLMs both under zero-shot and fine-tuned settings.
A Large Scale Search Dataset for Unbiased Learning to Rank
The unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) problem has been greatly advanced by recent deep learning techniques and well-designed debias algorithms. However, promising results on the existing benchmark datasets may not be extended to the practical scenario due to the following disadvantages observed from those popular benchmark datasets: (1) outdated semantic feature extraction where state-of-the-art large scale pre-trained language models like BERT cannot be exploited due to the missing of the original text;(2) incomplete display features for in-depth study of ULTR, e.g., missing the displayed abstract of documents for analyzing the click necessary bias; (3) lacking real-world user feedback, leading to the prevalence of synthetic datasets in the empirical study. To overcome the above disadvantages, we introduce the Baidu-ULTR dataset. It involves randomly sampled 1.2 billion searching sessions and 7,008 expert annotated queries, which is orders of magnitude larger than the existing ones. Baidu-ULTR provides:(1) the original semantic feature and a pre-trained language model for easy usage; (2) sufficient display information such as position, displayed height, and displayed abstract, enabling the comprehensive study of different biases with advanced techniques such as causal discovery and meta-learning; and (3) rich user feedback on search result pages (SERPs) like dwelling time, allowing for user engagement optimization and promoting the exploration of multi-task learning in ULTR. In this paper, we present the design principle of Baidu-ULTR and the performance of benchmark ULTR algorithms on this new data resource, favoring the exploration of ranking for long-tail queries and pre-training tasks for ranking. The Baidu-ULTR dataset and corresponding baseline implementation are available at https://github.com/ChuXiaokai/baidu_ultr_dataset.
CSS: A Large-scale Cross-schema Chinese Text-to-SQL Medical Dataset
The cross-domain text-to-SQL task aims to build a system that can parse user questions into SQL on complete unseen databases, and the single-domain text-to-SQL task evaluates the performance on identical databases. Both of these setups confront unavoidable difficulties in real-world applications. To this end, we introduce the cross-schema text-to-SQL task, where the databases of evaluation data are different from that in the training data but come from the same domain. Furthermore, we present CSS, a large-scale CrosS-Schema Chinese text-to-SQL dataset, to carry on corresponding studies. CSS originally consisted of 4,340 question/SQL pairs across 2 databases. In order to generalize models to different medical systems, we extend CSS and create 19 new databases along with 29,280 corresponding dataset examples. Moreover, CSS is also a large corpus for single-domain Chinese text-to-SQL studies. We present the data collection approach and a series of analyses of the data statistics. To show the potential and usefulness of CSS, benchmarking baselines have been conducted and reported. Our dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/zhanghanchong/css.
KINNEWS and KIRNEWS: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Text Classification for Kinyarwanda and Kirundi
Recent progress in text classification has been focused on high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. For low-resource languages, amongst them most African languages, the lack of well-annotated data and effective preprocessing, is hindering the progress and the transfer of successful methods. In this paper, we introduce two news datasets (KINNEWS and KIRNEWS) for multi-class classification of news articles in Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, two low-resource African languages. The two languages are mutually intelligible, but while Kinyarwanda has been studied in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to some extent, this work constitutes the first study on Kirundi. Along with the datasets, we provide statistics, guidelines for preprocessing, and monolingual and cross-lingual baseline models. Our experiments show that training embeddings on the relatively higher-resourced Kinyarwanda yields successful cross-lingual transfer to Kirundi. In addition, the design of the created datasets allows for a wider use in NLP beyond text classification in future studies, such as representation learning, cross-lingual learning with more distant languages, or as base for new annotations for tasks such as parsing, POS tagging, and NER. The datasets, stopwords, and pre-trained embeddings are publicly available at https://github.com/Andrews2017/KINNEWS-and-KIRNEWS-Corpus .
CX DB8: A queryable extractive summarizer and semantic search engine
Competitive Debate's increasingly technical nature has left competitors looking for tools to accelerate evidence production. We find that the unique type of extractive summarization performed by competitive debaters - summarization with a bias towards a particular target meaning - can be performed using the latest innovations in unsupervised pre-trained text vectorization models. We introduce CX_DB8, a queryable word-level extractive summarizer and evidence creation framework, which allows for rapid, biasable summarization of arbitarily sized texts. CX_DB8s usage of the embedding framework Flair means that as the underlying models improve, CX_DB8 will also improve. We observe that CX_DB8 also functions as a semantic search engine, and has application as a supplement to traditional "find" functionality in programs and webpages. CX_DB8 is currently used by competitive debaters and is made available to the public at https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/CX_DB8
Mapping Natural Language Commands to Web Elements
The web provides a rich, open-domain environment with textual, structural, and spatial properties. We propose a new task for grounding language in this environment: given a natural language command (e.g., "click on the second article"), choose the correct element on the web page (e.g., a hyperlink or text box). We collected a dataset of over 50,000 commands that capture various phenomena such as functional references (e.g. "find who made this site"), relational reasoning (e.g. "article by john"), and visual reasoning (e.g. "top-most article"). We also implemented and analyzed three baseline models that capture different phenomena present in the dataset.
The RefinedWeb Dataset for Falcon LLM: Outperforming Curated Corpora with Web Data, and Web Data Only
Large language models are commonly trained on a mixture of filtered web data and curated high-quality corpora, such as social media conversations, books, or technical papers. This curation process is believed to be necessary to produce performant models with broad zero-shot generalization abilities. However, as larger models requiring pretraining on trillions of tokens are considered, it is unclear how scalable is curation and whether we will run out of unique high-quality data soon. At variance with previous beliefs, we show that properly filtered and deduplicated web data alone can lead to powerful models; even significantly outperforming models from the state-of-the-art trained on The Pile. Despite extensive filtering, the high-quality data we extract from the web is still plentiful, and we are able to obtain five trillion tokens from CommonCrawl. We publicly release an extract of 600 billion tokens from our RefinedWeb dataset, and 1.3/7.5B parameters language models trained on it.
Learning to Mine Aligned Code and Natural Language Pairs from Stack Overflow
For tasks like code synthesis from natural language, code retrieval, and code summarization, data-driven models have shown great promise. However, creating these models require parallel data between natural language (NL) and code with fine-grained alignments. Stack Overflow (SO) is a promising source to create such a data set: the questions are diverse and most of them have corresponding answers with high-quality code snippets. However, existing heuristic methods (e.g., pairing the title of a post with the code in the accepted answer) are limited both in their coverage and the correctness of the NL-code pairs obtained. In this paper, we propose a novel method to mine high-quality aligned data from SO using two sets of features: hand-crafted features considering the structure of the extracted snippets, and correspondence features obtained by training a probabilistic model to capture the correlation between NL and code using neural networks. These features are fed into a classifier that determines the quality of mined NL-code pairs. Experiments using Python and Java as test beds show that the proposed method greatly expands coverage and accuracy over existing mining methods, even when using only a small number of labeled examples. Further, we find that reasonable results are achieved even when training the classifier on one language and testing on another, showing promise for scaling NL-code mining to a wide variety of programming languages beyond those for which we are able to annotate data.
RealKIE: Five Novel Datasets for Enterprise Key Information Extraction
We introduce RealKIE, a benchmark of five challenging datasets aimed at advancing key information extraction methods, with an emphasis on enterprise applications. The datasets include a diverse range of documents including SEC S1 Filings, US Non-disclosure Agreements, UK Charity Reports, FCC Invoices, and Resource Contracts. Each presents unique challenges: poor text serialization, sparse annotations in long documents, and complex tabular layouts. These datasets provide a realistic testing ground for key information extraction tasks like investment analysis and legal data processing. In addition to presenting these datasets, we offer an in-depth description of the annotation process, document processing techniques, and baseline modeling approaches. This contribution facilitates the development of NLP models capable of handling practical challenges and supports further research into information extraction technologies applicable to industry-specific problems. The annotated data and OCR outputs are available to download at https://indicodatasolutions.github.io/RealKIE/ code to reproduce the baselines will be available shortly.
AutoPureData: Automated Filtering of Web Data for LLM Fine-tuning
Up-to-date and reliable Large Language Models (LLMs) are consistently sought after. Typically, LLMs are trained on a fixed dataset and then deployed. However, the training data continually becomes outdated. Enable automatic training of AI using web data involves significant concerns regarding data quality and safety due to bias, spam, and other unsafe or unwanted text. Pure data is essential for producing reliable models. Training a model on impure data may result in undesirable outcomes. This research proposes a system that collects web data and automatically filters out unwanted text with the assistance of existing trusted AI models. In the experiment, a small sample of web data was collected and filtered, demonstrating the system's effectiveness in purifying the data.
Perplexed by Quality: A Perplexity-based Method for Adult and Harmful Content Detection in Multilingual Heterogeneous Web Data
As demand for large corpora increases with the size of current state-of-the-art language models, using web data as the main part of the pre-training corpus for these models has become a ubiquitous practice. This, in turn, has introduced an important challenge for NLP practitioners, as they are now confronted with the task of developing highly optimized models and pipelines for pre-processing large quantities of textual data, which implies, effectively classifying and filtering multilingual, heterogeneous and noisy data, at web scale. One of the main components of this pre-processing step for the pre-training corpora of large language models, is the removal of adult and harmful content. In this paper we explore different methods for detecting adult and harmful of content in multilingual heterogeneous web data. We first show how traditional methods in harmful content detection, that seemingly perform quite well in small and specialized datasets quickly break down when confronted with heterogeneous noisy web data. We then resort to using a perplexity based approach but with a twist: Instead of using a so-called "clean" corpus to train a small language model and then use perplexity so select the documents with low perplexity, i.e., the documents that resemble this so-called "clean" corpus the most. We train solely with adult and harmful textual data, and then select the documents having a perplexity value above a given threshold. This approach will virtually cluster our documents into two distinct groups, which will greatly facilitate the choice of the threshold for the perplexity and will also allow us to obtain higher precision than with the traditional classification methods for detecting adult and harmful content.
A Dataset of German Legal Documents for Named Entity Recognition
We describe a dataset developed for Named Entity Recognition in German federal court decisions. It consists of approx. 67,000 sentences with over 2 million tokens. The resource contains 54,000 manually annotated entities, mapped to 19 fine-grained semantic classes: person, judge, lawyer, country, city, street, landscape, organization, company, institution, court, brand, law, ordinance, European legal norm, regulation, contract, court decision, and legal literature. The legal documents were, furthermore, automatically annotated with more than 35,000 TimeML-based time expressions. The dataset, which is available under a CC-BY 4.0 license in the CoNNL-2002 format, was developed for training an NER service for German legal documents in the EU project Lynx.
CSMeD: Bridging the Dataset Gap in Automated Citation Screening for Systematic Literature Reviews
Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) play an essential role in summarising, synthesising and validating scientific evidence. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using machine learning techniques to automate the identification of relevant studies for SLRs. However, the lack of standardised evaluation datasets makes comparing the performance of such automated literature screening systems difficult. In this paper, we analyse the citation screening evaluation datasets, revealing that many of the available datasets are either too small, suffer from data leakage or have limited applicability to systems treating automated literature screening as a classification task, as opposed to, for example, a retrieval or question-answering task. To address these challenges, we introduce CSMeD, a meta-dataset consolidating nine publicly released collections, providing unified access to 325 SLRs from the fields of medicine and computer science. CSMeD serves as a comprehensive resource for training and evaluating the performance of automated citation screening models. Additionally, we introduce CSMeD-FT, a new dataset designed explicitly for evaluating the full text publication screening task. To demonstrate the utility of CSMeD, we conduct experiments and establish baselines on new datasets.
LSOIE: A Large-Scale Dataset for Supervised Open Information Extraction
Open Information Extraction (OIE) systems seek to compress the factual propositions of a sentence into a series of n-ary tuples. These tuples are useful for downstream tasks in natural language processing like knowledge base creation, textual entailment, and natural language understanding. However, current OIE datasets are limited in both size and diversity. We introduce a new dataset by converting the QA-SRL 2.0 dataset to a large-scale OIE dataset (LSOIE). Our LSOIE dataset is 20 times larger than the next largest human-annotated OIE dataset. We construct and evaluate several benchmark OIE models on LSOIE, providing baselines for future improvements on the task. Our LSOIE data, models, and code are made publicly available
Dbias: Detecting biases and ensuring Fairness in news articles
Because of the increasing use of data-centric systems and algorithms in machine learning, the topic of fairness is receiving a lot of attention in the academic and broader literature. This paper introduces Dbias (https://pypi.org/project/Dbias/), an open-source Python package for ensuring fairness in news articles. Dbias can take any text to determine if it is biased. Then, it detects biased words in the text, masks them, and suggests a set of sentences with new words that are bias-free or at least less biased. We conduct extensive experiments to assess the performance of Dbias. To see how well our approach works, we compare it to the existing fairness models. We also test the individual components of Dbias to see how effective they are. The experimental results show that Dbias outperforms all the baselines in terms of accuracy and fairness. We make this package (Dbias) as publicly available for the developers and practitioners to mitigate biases in textual data (such as news articles), as well as to encourage extension of this work.
SWEb: A Large Web Dataset for the Scandinavian Languages
This paper presents the hitherto largest pretraining dataset for the Scandinavian languages: the Scandinavian WEb (SWEb), comprising over one trillion tokens. The paper details the collection and processing pipeline, and introduces a novel model-based text extractor that significantly reduces complexity in comparison with rule-based approaches. We also introduce a new cloze-style benchmark for evaluating language models in Swedish, and use this test to compare models trained on the SWEb data to models trained on FineWeb, with competitive results. All data, models and code are shared openly.
Structural Text Segmentation of Legal Documents
The growing complexity of legal cases has lead to an increasing interest in legal information retrieval systems that can effectively satisfy user-specific information needs. However, such downstream systems typically require documents to be properly formatted and segmented, which is often done with relatively simple pre-processing steps, disregarding topical coherence of segments. Systems generally rely on representations of individual sentences or paragraphs, which may lack crucial context, or document-level representations, which are too long for meaningful search results. To address this issue, we propose a segmentation system that can predict topical coherence of sequential text segments spanning several paragraphs, effectively segmenting a document and providing a more balanced representation for downstream applications. We build our model on top of popular transformer networks and formulate structural text segmentation as topical change detection, by performing a series of independent classifications that allow for efficient fine-tuning on task-specific data. We crawl a novel dataset consisting of roughly 74,000 online Terms-of-Service documents, including hierarchical topic annotations, which we use for training. Results show that our proposed system significantly outperforms baselines, and adapts well to structural peculiarities of legal documents. We release both data and trained models to the research community for future work.https://github.com/dennlinger/TopicalChange
Benchmarking Abstractive Summarisation: A Dataset of Human-authored Summaries of Norwegian News Articles
We introduce a dataset of high-quality human-authored summaries of news articles in Norwegian. The dataset is intended for benchmarking the abstractive summarisation capabilities of generative language models. Each document in the dataset is provided with three different candidate gold-standard summaries written by native Norwegian speakers, and all summaries are provided in both of the written variants of Norwegian -- Bokm{\aa}l and Nynorsk. The paper describes details on the data creation effort as well as an evaluation of existing open LLMs for Norwegian on the dataset. We also provide insights from a manual human evaluation, comparing human-authored to model-generated summaries. Our results indicate that the dataset provides a challenging LLM benchmark for Norwegian summarisation capabilities
MuLMS: A Multi-Layer Annotated Text Corpus for Information Extraction in the Materials Science Domain
Keeping track of all relevant recent publications and experimental results for a research area is a challenging task. Prior work has demonstrated the efficacy of information extraction models in various scientific areas. Recently, several datasets have been released for the yet understudied materials science domain. However, these datasets focus on sub-problems such as parsing synthesis procedures or on sub-domains, e.g., solid oxide fuel cells. In this resource paper, we present MuLMS, a new dataset of 50 open-access articles, spanning seven sub-domains of materials science. The corpus has been annotated by domain experts with several layers ranging from named entities over relations to frame structures. We present competitive neural models for all tasks and demonstrate that multi-task training with existing related resources leads to benefits.
Text-to-SQL in the Wild: A Naturally-Occurring Dataset Based on Stack Exchange Data
Most available semantic parsing datasets, comprising of pairs of natural utterances and logical forms, were collected solely for the purpose of training and evaluation of natural language understanding systems. As a result, they do not contain any of the richness and variety of natural-occurring utterances, where humans ask about data they need or are curious about. In this work, we release SEDE, a dataset with 12,023 pairs of utterances and SQL queries collected from real usage on the Stack Exchange website. We show that these pairs contain a variety of real-world challenges which were rarely reflected so far in any other semantic parsing dataset, propose an evaluation metric based on comparison of partial query clauses that is more suitable for real-world queries, and conduct experiments with strong baselines, showing a large gap between the performance on SEDE compared to other common datasets.
Taxi1500: A Multilingual Dataset for Text Classification in 1500 Languages
While natural language processing tools have been developed extensively for some of the world's languages, a significant portion of the world's over 7000 languages are still neglected. One reason for this is that evaluation datasets do not yet cover a wide range of languages, including low-resource and endangered ones. We aim to address this issue by creating a text classification dataset encompassing a large number of languages, many of which currently have little to no annotated data available. We leverage parallel translations of the Bible to construct such a dataset by first developing applicable topics and employing a crowdsourcing tool to collect annotated data. By annotating the English side of the data and projecting the labels onto other languages through aligned verses, we generate text classification datasets for more than 1500 languages. We extensively benchmark several existing multilingual language models using our dataset. To facilitate the advancement of research in this area, we will release our dataset and code.
SPACE-IDEAS: A Dataset for Salient Information Detection in Space Innovation
Detecting salient parts in text using natural language processing has been widely used to mitigate the effects of information overflow. Nevertheless, most of the datasets available for this task are derived mainly from academic publications. We introduce SPACE-IDEAS, a dataset for salient information detection from innovation ideas related to the Space domain. The text in SPACE-IDEAS varies greatly and includes informal, technical, academic and business-oriented writing styles. In addition to a manually annotated dataset we release an extended version that is annotated using a large generative language model. We train different sentence and sequential sentence classifiers, and show that the automatically annotated dataset can be leveraged using multitask learning to train better classifiers.
HAGRID: A Human-LLM Collaborative Dataset for Generative Information-Seeking with Attribution
The rise of large language models (LLMs) had a transformative impact on search, ushering in a new era of search engines that are capable of generating search results in natural language text, imbued with citations for supporting sources. Building generative information-seeking models demands openly accessible datasets, which currently remain lacking. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset, HAGRID (Human-in-the-loop Attributable Generative Retrieval for Information-seeking Dataset) for building end-to-end generative information-seeking models that are capable of retrieving candidate quotes and generating attributed explanations. Unlike recent efforts that focus on human evaluation of black-box proprietary search engines, we built our dataset atop the English subset of MIRACL, a publicly available information retrieval dataset. HAGRID is constructed based on human and LLM collaboration. We first automatically collect attributed explanations that follow an in-context citation style using an LLM, i.e. GPT-3.5. Next, we ask human annotators to evaluate the LLM explanations based on two criteria: informativeness and attributability. HAGRID serves as a catalyst for the development of information-seeking models with better attribution capabilities.
MultiSubs: A Large-scale Multimodal and Multilingual Dataset
This paper introduces a large-scale multimodal and multilingual dataset that aims to facilitate research on grounding words to images in their contextual usage in language. The dataset consists of images selected to unambiguously illustrate concepts expressed in sentences from movie subtitles. The dataset is a valuable resource as (i) the images are aligned to text fragments rather than whole sentences; (ii) multiple images are possible for a text fragment and a sentence; (iii) the sentences are free-form and real-world like; (iv) the parallel texts are multilingual. We set up a fill-in-the-blank game for humans to evaluate the quality of the automatic image selection process of our dataset. We show the utility of the dataset on two automatic tasks: (i) fill-in-the-blank; (ii) lexical translation. Results of the human evaluation and automatic models demonstrate that images can be a useful complement to the textual context. The dataset will benefit research on visual grounding of words especially in the context of free-form sentences, and can be obtained from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5034604 under a Creative Commons licence.
KazNERD: Kazakh Named Entity Recognition Dataset
We present the development of a dataset for Kazakh named entity recognition. The dataset was built as there is a clear need for publicly available annotated corpora in Kazakh, as well as annotation guidelines containing straightforward--but rigorous--rules and examples. The dataset annotation, based on the IOB2 scheme, was carried out on television news text by two native Kazakh speakers under the supervision of the first author. The resulting dataset contains 112,702 sentences and 136,333 annotations for 25 entity classes. State-of-the-art machine learning models to automatise Kazakh named entity recognition were also built, with the best-performing model achieving an exact match F1-score of 97.22% on the test set. The annotated dataset, guidelines, and codes used to train the models are freely available for download under the CC BY 4.0 licence from https://github.com/IS2AI/KazNERD.
Language ID in the Wild: Unexpected Challenges on the Path to a Thousand-Language Web Text Corpus
Large text corpora are increasingly important for a wide variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, and automatic language identification (LangID) is a core technology needed to collect such datasets in a multilingual context. LangID is largely treated as solved in the literature, with models reported that achieve over 90% average F1 on as many as 1,366 languages. We train LangID models on up to 1,629 languages with comparable quality on held-out test sets, but find that human-judged LangID accuracy for web-crawl text corpora created using these models is only around 5% for many lower-resource languages, suggesting a need for more robust evaluation. Further analysis revealed a variety of error modes, arising from domain mismatch, class imbalance, language similarity, and insufficiently expressive models. We propose two classes of techniques to mitigate these errors: wordlist-based tunable-precision filters (for which we release curated lists in about 500 languages) and transformer-based semi-supervised LangID models, which increase median dataset precision from 5.5% to 71.2%. These techniques enable us to create an initial data set covering 100K or more relatively clean sentences in each of 500+ languages, paving the way towards a 1,000-language web text corpus.
Introducing Three New Benchmark Datasets for Hierarchical Text Classification
Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) is a natural language processing task with the objective to classify text documents into a set of classes from a structured class hierarchy. Many HTC approaches have been proposed which attempt to leverage the class hierarchy information in various ways to improve classification performance. Machine learning-based classification approaches require large amounts of training data and are most-commonly compared through three established benchmark datasets, which include the Web Of Science (WOS), Reuters Corpus Volume 1 Version 2 (RCV1-V2) and New York Times (NYT) datasets. However, apart from the RCV1-V2 dataset which is well-documented, these datasets are not accompanied with detailed description methodologies. In this paper, we introduce three new HTC benchmark datasets in the domain of research publications which comprise the titles and abstracts of papers from the Web of Science publication database. We first create two baseline datasets which use existing journal-and citation-based classification schemas. Due to the respective shortcomings of these two existing schemas, we propose an approach which combines their classifications to improve the reliability and robustness of the dataset. We evaluate the three created datasets with a clustering-based analysis and show that our proposed approach results in a higher quality dataset where documents that belong to the same class are semantically more similar compared to the other datasets. Finally, we provide the classification performance of four state-of-the-art HTC approaches on these three new datasets to provide baselines for future studies on machine learning-based techniques for scientific publication classification.
The Web Is Your Oyster - Knowledge-Intensive NLP against a Very Large Web Corpus
In order to address increasing demands of real-world applications, the research for knowledge-intensive NLP (KI-NLP) should advance by capturing the challenges of a truly open-domain environment: web-scale knowledge, lack of structure, inconsistent quality and noise. To this end, we propose a new setup for evaluating existing knowledge intensive tasks in which we generalize the background corpus to a universal web snapshot. We investigate a slate of NLP tasks which rely on knowledge - either factual or common sense, and ask systems to use a subset of CCNet - the Sphere corpus - as a knowledge source. In contrast to Wikipedia, otherwise a common background corpus in KI-NLP, Sphere is orders of magnitude larger and better reflects the full diversity of knowledge on the web. Despite potential gaps in coverage, challenges of scale, lack of structure and lower quality, we find that retrieval from Sphere enables a state of the art system to match and even outperform Wikipedia-based models on several tasks. We also observe that while a dense index can outperform a sparse BM25 baseline on Wikipedia, on Sphere this is not yet possible. To facilitate further research and minimise the community's reliance on proprietary, black-box search engines, we share our indices, evaluation metrics and infrastructure.
Bridging the Data Provenance Gap Across Text, Speech and Video
Progress in AI is driven largely by the scale and quality of training data. Despite this, there is a deficit of empirical analysis examining the attributes of well-established datasets beyond text. In this work we conduct the largest and first-of-its-kind longitudinal audit across modalities--popular text, speech, and video datasets--from their detailed sourcing trends and use restrictions to their geographical and linguistic representation. Our manual analysis covers nearly 4000 public datasets between 1990-2024, spanning 608 languages, 798 sources, 659 organizations, and 67 countries. We find that multimodal machine learning applications have overwhelmingly turned to web-crawled, synthetic, and social media platforms, such as YouTube, for their training sets, eclipsing all other sources since 2019. Secondly, tracing the chain of dataset derivations we find that while less than 33% of datasets are restrictively licensed, over 80% of the source content in widely-used text, speech, and video datasets, carry non-commercial restrictions. Finally, counter to the rising number of languages and geographies represented in public AI training datasets, our audit demonstrates measures of relative geographical and multilingual representation have failed to significantly improve their coverage since 2013. We believe the breadth of our audit enables us to empirically examine trends in data sourcing, restrictions, and Western-centricity at an ecosystem-level, and that visibility into these questions are essential to progress in responsible AI. As a contribution to ongoing improvements in dataset transparency and responsible use, we release our entire multimodal audit, allowing practitioners to trace data provenance across text, speech, and video.
MultiCoNER: A Large-scale Multilingual dataset for Complex Named Entity Recognition
We present MultiCoNER, a large multilingual dataset for Named Entity Recognition that covers 3 domains (Wiki sentences, questions, and search queries) across 11 languages, as well as multilingual and code-mixing subsets. This dataset is designed to represent contemporary challenges in NER, including low-context scenarios (short and uncased text), syntactically complex entities like movie titles, and long-tail entity distributions. The 26M token dataset is compiled from public resources using techniques such as heuristic-based sentence sampling, template extraction and slotting, and machine translation. We applied two NER models on our dataset: a baseline XLM-RoBERTa model, and a state-of-the-art GEMNET model that leverages gazetteers. The baseline achieves moderate performance (macro-F1=54%), highlighting the difficulty of our data. GEMNET, which uses gazetteers, improvement significantly (average improvement of macro-F1=+30%). MultiCoNER poses challenges even for large pre-trained language models, and we believe that it can help further research in building robust NER systems. MultiCoNER is publicly available at https://registry.opendata.aws/multiconer/ and we hope that this resource will help advance research in various aspects of NER.
WebCiteS: Attributed Query-Focused Summarization on Chinese Web Search Results with Citations
Enhancing the attribution in large language models (LLMs) is a crucial task. One feasible approach is to enable LLMs to cite external sources that support their generations. However, existing datasets and evaluation methods in this domain still exhibit notable limitations. In this work, we formulate the task of attributed query-focused summarization (AQFS) and present WebCiteS, a Chinese dataset featuring 7k human-annotated summaries with citations. WebCiteS derives from real-world user queries and web search results, offering a valuable resource for model training and evaluation. Prior works in attribution evaluation do not differentiate between groundedness errors and citation errors. They also fall short in automatically verifying sentences that draw partial support from multiple sources. We tackle these issues by developing detailed metrics and enabling the automatic evaluator to decompose the sentences into sub-claims for fine-grained verification. Our comprehensive evaluation of both open-source and proprietary models on WebCiteS highlights the challenge LLMs face in correctly citing sources, underscoring the necessity for further improvement. The dataset and code will be open-sourced to facilitate further research in this crucial field.
BanglaParaphrase: A High-Quality Bangla Paraphrase Dataset
In this work, we present BanglaParaphrase, a high-quality synthetic Bangla Paraphrase dataset curated by a novel filtering pipeline. We aim to take a step towards alleviating the low resource status of the Bangla language in the NLP domain through the introduction of BanglaParaphrase, which ensures quality by preserving both semantics and diversity, making it particularly useful to enhance other Bangla datasets. We show a detailed comparative analysis between our dataset and models trained on it with other existing works to establish the viability of our synthetic paraphrase data generation pipeline. We are making the dataset and models publicly available at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/banglaparaphrase to further the state of Bangla NLP.
Large Language Models Struggle to Describe the Haystack without Human Help: Human-in-the-loop Evaluation of LLMs
A common use of NLP is to facilitate the understanding of large document collections, with a shift from using traditional topic models to Large Language Models. Yet the effectiveness of using LLM for large corpus understanding in real-world applications remains under-explored. This study measures the knowledge users acquire with unsupervised, supervised LLM-based exploratory approaches or traditional topic models on two datasets. While LLM-based methods generate more human-readable topics and show higher average win probabilities than traditional models for data exploration, they produce overly generic topics for domain-specific datasets that do not easily allow users to learn much about the documents. Adding human supervision to the LLM generation process improves data exploration by mitigating hallucination and over-genericity but requires greater human effort. In contrast, traditional. models like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) remain effective for exploration but are less user-friendly. We show that LLMs struggle to describe the haystack of large corpora without human help, particularly domain-specific data, and face scaling and hallucination limitations due to context length constraints. Dataset available at https://huggingface. co/datasets/zli12321/Bills.
Multi-Vector Models with Textual Guidance for Fine-Grained Scientific Document Similarity
We present a new scientific document similarity model based on matching fine-grained aspects of texts. To train our model, we exploit a naturally-occurring source of supervision: sentences in the full-text of papers that cite multiple papers together (co-citations). Such co-citations not only reflect close paper relatedness, but also provide textual descriptions of how the co-cited papers are related. This novel form of textual supervision is used for learning to match aspects across papers. We develop multi-vector representations where vectors correspond to sentence-level aspects of documents, and present two methods for aspect matching: (1) A fast method that only matches single aspects, and (2) a method that makes sparse multiple matches with an Optimal Transport mechanism that computes an Earth Mover's Distance between aspects. Our approach improves performance on document similarity tasks in four datasets. Further, our fast single-match method achieves competitive results, paving the way for applying fine-grained similarity to large scientific corpora. Code, data, and models available at: https://github.com/allenai/aspire
SEFD: Semantic-Enhanced Framework for Detecting LLM-Generated Text
The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) has created an urgent need for robust tools to detect LLM-generated text, especially in light of paraphrasing techniques that often evade existing detection methods. To address this challenge, we present a novel semantic-enhanced framework for detecting LLM-generated text (SEFD) that leverages a retrieval-based mechanism to fully utilize text semantics. Our framework improves upon existing detection methods by systematically integrating retrieval-based techniques with traditional detectors, employing a carefully curated retrieval mechanism that strikes a balance between comprehensive coverage and computational efficiency. We showcase the effectiveness of our approach in sequential text scenarios common in real-world applications, such as online forums and Q\&A platforms. Through comprehensive experiments across various LLM-generated texts and detection methods, we demonstrate that our framework substantially enhances detection accuracy in paraphrasing scenarios while maintaining robustness for standard LLM-generated content.
Annotated Dataset Creation through General Purpose Language Models for non-English Medical NLP
Obtaining text datasets with semantic annotations is an effortful process, yet crucial for supervised training in natural language processsing (NLP). In general, developing and applying new NLP pipelines in domain-specific contexts for tasks often requires custom designed datasets to address NLP tasks in supervised machine learning fashion. When operating in non-English languages for medical data processing, this exposes several minor and major, interconnected problems such as lack of task-matching datasets as well as task-specific pre-trained models. In our work we suggest to leverage pretrained language models for training data acquisition in order to retrieve sufficiently large datasets for training smaller and more efficient models for use-case specific tasks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of your approach, we create a custom dataset which we use to train a medical NER model for German texts, GPTNERMED, yet our method remains language-independent in principle. Our obtained dataset as well as our pre-trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/frankkramer-lab/GPTNERMED
Quality Not Quantity: On the Interaction between Dataset Design and Robustness of CLIP
Web-crawled datasets have enabled remarkable generalization capabilities in recent image-text models such as CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image pre-training) or Flamingo, but little is known about the dataset creation processes. In this work, we introduce a testbed of six publicly available data sources - YFCC, LAION, Conceptual Captions, WIT, RedCaps, Shutterstock - to investigate how pre-training distributions induce robustness in CLIP. We find that the performance of the pre-training data varies substantially across distribution shifts, with no single data source dominating. Moreover, we systematically study the interactions between these data sources and find that combining multiple sources does not necessarily yield better models, but rather dilutes the robustness of the best individual data source. We complement our empirical findings with theoretical insights from a simple setting, where combining the training data also results in diluted robustness. In addition, our theoretical model provides a candidate explanation for the success of the CLIP-based data filtering technique recently employed in the LAION dataset. Overall our results demonstrate that simply gathering a large amount of data from the web is not the most effective way to build a pre-training dataset for robust generalization, necessitating further study into dataset design. Code is available at https://github.com/mlfoundations/clip_quality_not_quantity.
Exploiting Twitter as Source of Large Corpora of Weakly Similar Pairs for Semantic Sentence Embeddings
Semantic sentence embeddings are usually supervisedly built minimizing distances between pairs of embeddings of sentences labelled as semantically similar by annotators. Since big labelled datasets are rare, in particular for non-English languages, and expensive, recent studies focus on unsupervised approaches that require not-paired input sentences. We instead propose a language-independent approach to build large datasets of pairs of informal texts weakly similar, without manual human effort, exploiting Twitter's intrinsic powerful signals of relatedness: replies and quotes of tweets. We use the collected pairs to train a Transformer model with triplet-like structures, and we test the generated embeddings on Twitter NLP similarity tasks (PIT and TURL) and STSb. We also introduce four new sentence ranking evaluation benchmarks of informal texts, carefully extracted from the initial collections of tweets, proving not only that our best model learns classical Semantic Textual Similarity, but also excels on tasks where pairs of sentences are not exact paraphrases. Ablation studies reveal how increasing the corpus size influences positively the results, even at 2M samples, suggesting that bigger collections of Tweets still do not contain redundant information about semantic similarities.
Generative AI-Based Text Generation Methods Using Pre-Trained GPT-2 Model
This work delved into the realm of automatic text generation, exploring a variety of techniques ranging from traditional deterministic approaches to more modern stochastic methods. Through analysis of greedy search, beam search, top-k sampling, top-p sampling, contrastive searching, and locally typical searching, this work has provided valuable insights into the strengths, weaknesses, and potential applications of each method. Each text-generating method is evaluated using several standard metrics and a comparative study has been made on the performance of the approaches. Finally, some future directions of research in the field of automatic text generation are also identified.
Large Language Models Struggle to Learn Long-Tail Knowledge
The internet contains a wealth of knowledge -- from the birthdays of historical figures to tutorials on how to code -- all of which may be learned by language models. However, there is a huge variability in the number of times a given piece of information appears on the web. In this paper, we study the relationship between the knowledge memorized by large language models and the information in their pre-training datasets. In particular, we show that a language model's ability to answer a fact-based question relates to how many documents associated with that question were seen during pre-training. We identify these relevant documents by entity linking pre-training datasets and counting documents that contain the same entities as a given question-answer pair. Our results demonstrate strong correlational and causal relationships between accuracy and relevant document count for numerous question answering datasets (e.g., TriviaQA), pre-training corpora (e.g., ROOTS), and model sizes (e.g., 176B parameters). Moreover, we find that while larger models are better at learning long-tail knowledge, we estimate that today's models must be scaled by many orders of magnitude to reach competitive QA performance on questions with little support in the pre-training data. Finally, we show that retrieval-augmentation can reduce the dependence on relevant document count, presenting a promising approach for capturing the long-tail.
DocRED: A Large-Scale Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset
Multiple entities in a document generally exhibit complex inter-sentence relations, and cannot be well handled by existing relation extraction (RE) methods that typically focus on extracting intra-sentence relations for single entity pairs. In order to accelerate the research on document-level RE, we introduce DocRED, a new dataset constructed from Wikipedia and Wikidata with three features: (1) DocRED annotates both named entities and relations, and is the largest human-annotated dataset for document-level RE from plain text; (2) DocRED requires reading multiple sentences in a document to extract entities and infer their relations by synthesizing all information of the document; (3) along with the human-annotated data, we also offer large-scale distantly supervised data, which enables DocRED to be adopted for both supervised and weakly supervised scenarios. In order to verify the challenges of document-level RE, we implement recent state-of-the-art methods for RE and conduct a thorough evaluation of these methods on DocRED. Empirical results show that DocRED is challenging for existing RE methods, which indicates that document-level RE remains an open problem and requires further efforts. Based on the detailed analysis on the experiments, we discuss multiple promising directions for future research.
Beyond Factual Accuracy: Evaluating Coverage of Diverse Factual Information in Long-form Text Generation
This paper presents ICAT, an evaluation framework for measuring coverage of diverse factual information in long-form text generation. ICAT breaks down a long output text into a list of atomic claims and not only verifies each claim through retrieval from a (reliable) knowledge source, but also computes the alignment between the atomic factual claims and various aspects expected to be presented in the output. We study three implementations of the ICAT framework, each with a different assumption on the availability of aspects and alignment method. By adopting data from the diversification task in the TREC Web Track and the ClueWeb corpus, we evaluate the ICAT framework. We demonstrate strong correlation with human judgments and provide comprehensive evaluation across multiple state-of-the-art LLMs. Our framework further offers interpretable and fine-grained analysis of diversity and coverage. Its modular design allows for easy adaptation to different domains and datasets, making it a valuable tool for evaluating the qualitative aspects of long-form responses produced by LLMs.
Text Clustering as Classification with LLMs
Text clustering remains valuable in real-world applications where manual labeling is cost-prohibitive. It facilitates efficient organization and analysis of information by grouping similar texts based on their representations. However, implementing this approach necessitates fine-tuned embedders for downstream data and sophisticated similarity metrics. To address this issue, this study presents a novel framework for text clustering that effectively leverages the in-context learning capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs). Instead of fine-tuning embedders, we propose to transform the text clustering into a classification task via LLM. First, we prompt LLM to generate potential labels for a given dataset. Second, after integrating similar labels generated by the LLM, we prompt the LLM to assign the most appropriate label to each sample in the dataset. Our framework has been experimentally proven to achieve comparable or superior performance to state-of-the-art clustering methods that employ embeddings, without requiring complex fine-tuning or clustering algorithms. We make our code available to the public for utilization at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Text-Clustering-via-LLM-E500.
AbLit: A Resource for Analyzing and Generating Abridged Versions of English Literature
Creating an abridged version of a text involves shortening it while maintaining its linguistic qualities. In this paper, we examine this task from an NLP perspective for the first time. We present a new resource, AbLit, which is derived from abridged versions of English literature books. The dataset captures passage-level alignments between the original and abridged texts. We characterize the linguistic relations of these alignments, and create automated models to predict these relations as well as to generate abridgements for new texts. Our findings establish abridgement as a challenging task, motivating future resources and research. The dataset is available at github.com/roemmele/AbLit.
Qilin: A Multimodal Information Retrieval Dataset with APP-level User Sessions
User-generated content (UGC) communities, especially those featuring multimodal content, improve user experiences by integrating visual and textual information into results (or items). The challenge of improving user experiences in complex systems with search and recommendation (S\&R) services has drawn significant attention from both academia and industry these years. However, the lack of high-quality datasets has limited the research progress on multimodal S\&R. To address the growing need for developing better S\&R services, we present a novel multimodal information retrieval dataset in this paper, namely Qilin. The dataset is collected from Xiaohongshu, a popular social platform with over 300 million monthly active users and an average search penetration rate of over 70\%. In contrast to existing datasets, Qilin offers a comprehensive collection of user sessions with heterogeneous results like image-text notes, video notes, commercial notes, and direct answers, facilitating the development of advanced multimodal neural retrieval models across diverse task settings. To better model user satisfaction and support the analysis of heterogeneous user behaviors, we also collect extensive APP-level contextual signals and genuine user feedback. Notably, Qilin contains user-favored answers and their referred results for search requests triggering the Deep Query Answering (DQA) module. This allows not only the training \& evaluation of a Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline, but also the exploration of how such a module would affect users' search behavior. Through comprehensive analysis and experiments, we provide interesting findings and insights for further improving S\&R systems. We hope that Qilin will significantly contribute to the advancement of multimodal content platforms with S\&R services in the future.
GenCodeSearchNet: A Benchmark Test Suite for Evaluating Generalization in Programming Language Understanding
Language models can serve as a valuable tool for software developers to increase productivity. Large generative models can be used for code generation and code completion, while smaller encoder-only models are capable of performing code search tasks using natural language queries.These capabilities are heavily influenced by the quality and diversity of the available training data. Source code datasets used for training usually focus on the most popular languages and testing is mostly conducted on the same distributions, often overlooking low-resource programming languages. Motivated by the NLP generalization taxonomy proposed by Hupkes et.\,al., we propose a new benchmark dataset called GenCodeSearchNet (GeCS) which builds upon existing natural language code search datasets to systemically evaluate the programming language understanding generalization capabilities of language models. As part of the full dataset, we introduce a new, manually curated subset StatCodeSearch that focuses on R, a popular but so far underrepresented programming language that is often used by researchers outside the field of computer science. For evaluation and comparison, we collect several baseline results using fine-tuned BERT-style models and GPT-style large language models in a zero-shot setting.
RedPajama: an Open Dataset for Training Large Language Models
Large language models are increasingly becoming a cornerstone technology in artificial intelligence, the sciences, and society as a whole, yet the optimal strategies for dataset composition and filtering remain largely elusive. Many of the top-performing models lack transparency in their dataset curation and model development processes, posing an obstacle to the development of fully open language models. In this paper, we identify three core data-related challenges that must be addressed to advance open-source language models. These include (1) transparency in model development, including the data curation process, (2) access to large quantities of high-quality data, and (3) availability of artifacts and metadata for dataset curation and analysis. To address these challenges, we release RedPajama-V1, an open reproduction of the LLaMA training dataset. In addition, we release RedPajama-V2, a massive web-only dataset consisting of raw, unfiltered text data together with quality signals and metadata. Together, the RedPajama datasets comprise over 100 trillion tokens spanning multiple domains and with their quality signals facilitate the filtering of data, aiming to inspire the development of numerous new datasets. To date, these datasets have already been used in the training of strong language models used in production, such as Snowflake Arctic, Salesforce's XGen and AI2's OLMo. To provide insight into the quality of RedPajama, we present a series of analyses and ablation studies with decoder-only language models with up to 1.6B parameters. Our findings demonstrate how quality signals for web data can be effectively leveraged to curate high-quality subsets of the dataset, underscoring the potential of RedPajama to advance the development of transparent and high-performing language models at scale.
Symlink: A New Dataset for Scientific Symbol-Description Linking
Mathematical symbols and descriptions appear in various forms across document section boundaries without explicit markup. In this paper, we present a new large-scale dataset that emphasizes extracting symbols and descriptions in scientific documents. Symlink annotates scientific papers of 5 different domains (i.e., computer science, biology, physics, mathematics, and economics). Our experiments on Symlink demonstrate the challenges of the symbol-description linking task for existing models and call for further research effort in this area. We will publicly release Symlink to facilitate future research.
Siamese BERT-based Model for Web Search Relevance Ranking Evaluated on a New Czech Dataset
Web search engines focus on serving highly relevant results within hundreds of milliseconds. Pre-trained language transformer models such as BERT are therefore hard to use in this scenario due to their high computational demands. We present our real-time approach to the document ranking problem leveraging a BERT-based siamese architecture. The model is already deployed in a commercial search engine and it improves production performance by more than 3%. For further research and evaluation, we release DaReCzech, a unique data set of 1.6 million Czech user query-document pairs with manually assigned relevance levels. We also release Small-E-Czech, an Electra-small language model pre-trained on a large Czech corpus. We believe this data will support endeavours both of search relevance and multilingual-focused research communities.
Organize the Web: Constructing Domains Enhances Pre-Training Data Curation
Modern language models are trained on large, unstructured datasets consisting of trillions of tokens and obtained by crawling the web. The unstructured nature makes it difficult to reason about their contents and develop systematic approaches to data curation. In this paper, we unpack monolithic web corpora by developing taxonomies of their contents and organizing them into domains. We introduce WebOrganizer, a framework for organizing web pages in terms of both their topic and format. Using these two complementary notions of domains, we automatically annotate pre-training data by distilling annotations from a large language model into efficient classifiers. This allows us to study how data from different domains should be mixed to improve models on downstream tasks, and we show that we can combine insights about effective topics and formats to further boost performance. We demonstrate that our domain mixing also improves existing methods that select data based on quality. Furthermore, we study and compare how quality-based methods will implicitly change the domain mixture. Overall, our work demonstrates that constructing and mixing domains provides a valuable complement to quality-based data curation methods, opening new avenues for effective and insightful pre-training data curation.
SetCSE: Set Operations using Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings
Taking inspiration from Set Theory, we introduce SetCSE, an innovative information retrieval framework. SetCSE employs sets to represent complex semantics and incorporates well-defined operations for structured information querying under the provided context. Within this framework, we introduce an inter-set contrastive learning objective to enhance comprehension of sentence embedding models concerning the given semantics. Furthermore, we present a suite of operations, including SetCSE intersection, difference, and operation series, that leverage sentence embeddings of the enhanced model for complex sentence retrieval tasks. Throughout this paper, we demonstrate that SetCSE adheres to the conventions of human language expressions regarding compounded semantics, provides a significant enhancement in the discriminatory capability of underlying sentence embedding models, and enables numerous information retrieval tasks involving convoluted and intricate prompts which cannot be achieved using existing querying methods.
Raiders of the Lost Kek: 3.5 Years of Augmented 4chan Posts from the Politically Incorrect Board
This paper presents a dataset with over 3.3M threads and 134.5M posts from the Politically Incorrect board (/pol/) of the imageboard forum 4chan, posted over a period of almost 3.5 years (June 2016-November 2019). To the best of our knowledge, this represents the largest publicly available 4chan dataset, providing the community with an archive of posts that have been permanently deleted from 4chan and are otherwise inaccessible. We augment the data with a set of additional labels, including toxicity scores and the named entities mentioned in each post. We also present a statistical analysis of the dataset, providing an overview of what researchers interested in using it can expect, as well as a simple content analysis, shedding light on the most prominent discussion topics, the most popular entities mentioned, and the toxicity level of each post. Overall, we are confident that our work will motivate and assist researchers in studying and understanding 4chan, as well as its role on the greater Web. For instance, we hope this dataset may be used for cross-platform studies of social media, as well as being useful for other types of research like natural language processing. Finally, our dataset can assist qualitative work focusing on in-depth case studies of specific narratives, events, or social theories.
Some Like It Small: Czech Semantic Embedding Models for Industry Applications
This article focuses on the development and evaluation of Small-sized Czech sentence embedding models. Small models are important components for real-time industry applications in resource-constrained environments. Given the limited availability of labeled Czech data, alternative approaches, including pre-training, knowledge distillation, and unsupervised contrastive fine-tuning, are investigated. Comprehensive intrinsic and extrinsic analyses are conducted, showcasing the competitive performance of our models compared to significantly larger counterparts, with approximately 8 times smaller size and 5 times faster speed than conventional Base-sized models. To promote cooperation and reproducibility, both the models and the evaluation pipeline are made publicly accessible. Ultimately, this article presents practical applications of the developed sentence embedding models in Seznam.cz, the Czech search engine. These models have effectively replaced previous counterparts, enhancing the overall search experience for instance, in organic search, featured snippets, and image search. This transition has yielded improved performance.
BOUQuET: dataset, Benchmark and Open initiative for Universal Quality Evaluation in Translation
This paper presents BOUQuET, a multicentric and multi-register/domain dataset and benchmark, and its broader collaborative extension initiative. This dataset is handcrafted in non-English languages first, each of these source languages being represented among the 23 languages commonly used by half of the world's population and therefore having the potential to serve as pivot languages that will enable more accurate translations. The dataset is specially designed to avoid contamination and be multicentric, so as to enforce representation of multilingual language features. In addition, the dataset goes beyond the sentence level, as it is organized in paragraphs of various lengths. Compared with related machine translation (MT) datasets, we show that BOUQuET has a broader representation of domains while simplifying the translation task for non-experts. Therefore, BOUQuET is specially suitable for the open initiative and call for translation participation that we are launching to extend it to a multi-way parallel corpus to any written language.
MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages
We take a step towards addressing the under-representation of the African continent in NLP research by creating the first large publicly available high-quality dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in ten African languages, bringing together a variety of stakeholders. We detail characteristics of the languages to help researchers understand the challenges that these languages pose for NER. We analyze our datasets and conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art methods across both supervised and transfer learning settings. We release the data, code, and models in order to inspire future research on African NLP.
Know thy corpus! Robust methods for digital curation of Web corpora
This paper proposes a novel framework for digital curation of Web corpora in order to provide robust estimation of their parameters, such as their composition and the lexicon. In recent years language models pre-trained on large corpora emerged as clear winners in numerous NLP tasks, but no proper analysis of the corpora which led to their success has been conducted. The paper presents a procedure for robust frequency estimation, which helps in establishing the core lexicon for a given corpus, as well as a procedure for estimating the corpus composition via unsupervised topic models and via supervised genre classification of Web pages. The results of the digital curation study applied to several Web-derived corpora demonstrate their considerable differences. First, this concerns different frequency bursts which impact the core lexicon obtained from each corpus. Second, this concerns the kinds of texts they contain. For example, OpenWebText contains considerably more topical news and political argumentation in comparison to ukWac or Wikipedia. The tools and the results of analysis have been released.
SParC: Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing in Context
We present SParC, a dataset for cross-domainSemanticParsing inContext that consists of 4,298 coherent question sequences (12k+ individual questions annotated with SQL queries). It is obtained from controlled user interactions with 200 complex databases over 138 domains. We provide an in-depth analysis of SParC and show that it introduces new challenges compared to existing datasets. SParC demonstrates complex contextual dependencies, (2) has greater semantic diversity, and (3) requires generalization to unseen domains due to its cross-domain nature and the unseen databases at test time. We experiment with two state-of-the-art text-to-SQL models adapted to the context-dependent, cross-domain setup. The best model obtains an exact match accuracy of 20.2% over all questions and less than10% over all interaction sequences, indicating that the cross-domain setting and the con-textual phenomena of the dataset present significant challenges for future research. The dataset, baselines, and leaderboard are released at https://yale-lily.github.io/sparc.
Fine-grained Czech News Article Dataset: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Trustworthiness Analysis
We present the Verifee Dataset: a novel dataset of news articles with fine-grained trustworthiness annotations. We develop a detailed methodology that assesses the texts based on their parameters encompassing editorial transparency, journalist conventions, and objective reporting while penalizing manipulative techniques. We bring aboard a diverse set of researchers from social, media, and computer sciences to overcome barriers and limited framing of this interdisciplinary problem. We collect over 10,000 unique articles from almost 60 Czech online news sources. These are categorized into one of the 4 classes across the credibility spectrum we propose, raging from entirely trustworthy articles all the way to the manipulative ones. We produce detailed statistics and study trends emerging throughout the set. Lastly, we fine-tune multiple popular sequence-to-sequence language models using our dataset on the trustworthiness classification task and report the best testing F-1 score of 0.52. We open-source the dataset, annotation methodology, and annotators' instructions in full length at https://verifee.ai/research to enable easy build-up work. We believe similar methods can help prevent disinformation and educate in the realm of media literacy.
MINERS: Multilingual Language Models as Semantic Retrievers
Words have been represented in a high-dimensional vector space that encodes their semantic similarities, enabling downstream applications such as retrieving synonyms, antonyms, and relevant contexts. However, despite recent advances in multilingual language models (LMs), the effectiveness of these models' representations in semantic retrieval contexts has not been comprehensively explored. To fill this gap, this paper introduces the MINERS, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of multilingual LMs in semantic retrieval tasks, including bitext mining and classification via retrieval-augmented contexts. We create a comprehensive framework to assess the robustness of LMs in retrieving samples across over 200 diverse languages, including extremely low-resource languages in challenging cross-lingual and code-switching settings. Our results demonstrate that by solely retrieving semantically similar embeddings yields performance competitive with state-of-the-art approaches, without requiring any fine-tuning.
For those who don't know (how) to ask: Building a dataset of technology questions for digital newcomers
While the rise of large language models (LLMs) has created rich new opportunities to learn about digital technology, many on the margins of this technology struggle to gain and maintain competency due to lexical or conceptual barriers that prevent them from asking appropriate questions. Although there have been many efforts to understand factuality of LLM-created content and ability of LLMs to answer questions, it is not well understood how unclear or nonstandard language queries affect the model outputs. We propose the creation of a dataset that captures questions of digital newcomers and outsiders, utilizing data we have compiled from a decade's worth of one-on-one tutoring. In this paper we lay out our planned efforts and some potential uses of this dataset.
A Pilot Study for Chinese SQL Semantic Parsing
The task of semantic parsing is highly useful for dialogue and question answering systems. Many datasets have been proposed to map natural language text into SQL, among which the recent Spider dataset provides cross-domain samples with multiple tables and complex queries. We build a Spider dataset for Chinese, which is currently a low-resource language in this task area. Interesting research questions arise from the uniqueness of the language, which requires word segmentation, and also from the fact that SQL keywords and columns of DB tables are typically written in English. We compare character- and word-based encoders for a semantic parser, and different embedding schemes. Results show that word-based semantic parser is subject to segmentation errors and cross-lingual word embeddings are useful for text-to-SQL.
WebFAQ: A Multilingual Collection of Natural Q&A Datasets for Dense Retrieval
We present WebFAQ, a large-scale collection of open-domain question answering datasets derived from FAQ-style schema.org annotations. In total, the data collection consists of 96 million natural question-answer (QA) pairs across 75 languages, including 47 million (49%) non-English samples. WebFAQ further serves as the foundation for 20 monolingual retrieval benchmarks with a total size of 11.2 million QA pairs (5.9 million non-English). These datasets are carefully curated through refined filtering and near-duplicate detection, yielding high-quality resources for training and evaluating multilingual dense retrieval models. To empirically confirm WebFAQ's efficacy, we use the collected QAs to fine-tune an in-domain pretrained XLM-RoBERTa model. Through this process of dataset-specific fine-tuning, the model achieves significant retrieval performance gains, which generalize - beyond WebFAQ - to other multilingual retrieval benchmarks evaluated in zero-shot setting. Last but not least, we utilize WebFAQ to construct a set of QA-aligned bilingual corpora spanning over 1000 language pairs using state-of-the-art bitext mining and automated LLM-assessed translation evaluation. Due to our advanced, automated method of bitext dataset generation, the resulting bilingual corpora demonstrate higher translation quality compared to similar datasets. WebFAQ and all associated resources are publicly available on GitHub and HuggingFace.
NIFTY Financial News Headlines Dataset
We introduce and make publicly available the NIFTY Financial News Headlines dataset, designed to facilitate and advance research in financial market forecasting using large language models (LLMs). This dataset comprises two distinct versions tailored for different modeling approaches: (i) NIFTY-LM, which targets supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of LLMs with an auto-regressive, causal language-modeling objective, and (ii) NIFTY-RL, formatted specifically for alignment methods (like reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)) to align LLMs via rejection sampling and reward modeling. Each dataset version provides curated, high-quality data incorporating comprehensive metadata, market indices, and deduplicated financial news headlines systematically filtered and ranked to suit modern LLM frameworks. We also include experiments demonstrating some applications of the dataset in tasks like stock price movement and the role of LLM embeddings in information acquisition/richness. The NIFTY dataset along with utilities (like truncating prompt's context length systematically) are available on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/raeidsaqur/NIFTY.
unarXive 2022: All arXiv Publications Pre-Processed for NLP, Including Structured Full-Text and Citation Network
Large-scale data sets on scholarly publications are the basis for a variety of bibliometric analyses and natural language processing (NLP) applications. Especially data sets derived from publication's full-text have recently gained attention. While several such data sets already exist, we see key shortcomings in terms of their domain and time coverage, citation network completeness, and representation of full-text content. To address these points, we propose a new version of the data set unarXive. We base our data processing pipeline and output format on two existing data sets, and improve on each of them. Our resulting data set comprises 1.9 M publications spanning multiple disciplines and 32 years. It furthermore has a more complete citation network than its predecessors and retains a richer representation of document structure as well as non-textual publication content such as mathematical notation. In addition to the data set, we provide ready-to-use training/test data for citation recommendation and IMRaD classification. All data and source code is publicly available at https://github.com/IllDepence/unarXive.
SCROLLS: Standardized CompaRison Over Long Language Sequences
NLP benchmarks have largely focused on short texts, such as sentences and paragraphs, even though long texts comprise a considerable amount of natural language in the wild. We introduce SCROLLS, a suite of tasks that require reasoning over long texts. We examine existing long-text datasets, and handpick ones where the text is naturally long, while prioritizing tasks that involve synthesizing information across the input. SCROLLS contains summarization, question answering, and natural language inference tasks, covering multiple domains, including literature, science, business, and entertainment. Initial baselines, including Longformer Encoder-Decoder, indicate that there is ample room for improvement on SCROLLS. We make all datasets available in a unified text-to-text format and host a live leaderboard to facilitate research on model architecture and pretraining methods.
Evaluation of Word Embeddings for the Social Sciences
Word embeddings are an essential instrument in many NLP tasks. Most available resources are trained on general language from Web corpora or Wikipedia dumps. However, word embeddings for domain-specific language are rare, in particular for the social science domain. Therefore, in this work, we describe the creation and evaluation of word embedding models based on 37,604 open-access social science research papers. In the evaluation, we compare domain-specific and general language models for (i) language coverage, (ii) diversity, and (iii) semantic relationships. We found that the created domain-specific model, even with a relatively small vocabulary size, covers a large part of social science concepts, their neighborhoods are diverse in comparison to more general models. Across all relation types, we found a more extensive coverage of semantic relationships.
NewsQA: A Machine Comprehension Dataset
We present NewsQA, a challenging machine comprehension dataset of over 100,000 human-generated question-answer pairs. Crowdworkers supply questions and answers based on a set of over 10,000 news articles from CNN, with answers consisting of spans of text from the corresponding articles. We collect this dataset through a four-stage process designed to solicit exploratory questions that require reasoning. A thorough analysis confirms that NewsQA demands abilities beyond simple word matching and recognizing textual entailment. We measure human performance on the dataset and compare it to several strong neural models. The performance gap between humans and machines (0.198 in F1) indicates that significant progress can be made on NewsQA through future research. The dataset is freely available at https://datasets.maluuba.com/NewsQA.
Unsupervised Matching of Data and Text
Entity resolution is a widely studied problem with several proposals to match records across relations. Matching textual content is a widespread task in many applications, such as question answering and search. While recent methods achieve promising results for these two tasks, there is no clear solution for the more general problem of matching textual content and structured data. We introduce a framework that supports this new task in an unsupervised setting for any pair of corpora, being relational tables or text documents. Our method builds a fine-grained graph over the content of the corpora and derives word embeddings to represent the objects to match in a low dimensional space. The learned representation enables effective and efficient matching at different granularity, from relational tuples to text sentences and paragraphs. Our flexible framework can exploit pre-trained resources, but it does not depends on their existence and achieves better quality performance in matching content when the vocabulary is domain specific. We also introduce optimizations in the graph creation process with an "expand and compress" approach that first identifies new valid relationships across elements, to improve matching, and then prunes nodes and edges, to reduce the graph size. Experiments on real use cases and public datasets show that our framework produces embeddings that outperform word embeddings and fine-tuned language models both in results' quality and in execution times.
Joint Representations of Text and Knowledge Graphs for Retrieval and Evaluation
A key feature of neural models is that they can produce semantic vector representations of objects (texts, images, speech, etc.) ensuring that similar objects are close to each other in the vector space. While much work has focused on learning representations for other modalities, there are no aligned cross-modal representations for text and knowledge base (KB) elements. One challenge for learning such representations is the lack of parallel data, which we use contrastive training on heuristics-based datasets and data augmentation to overcome, training embedding models on (KB graph, text) pairs. On WebNLG, a cleaner manually crafted dataset, we show that they learn aligned representations suitable for retrieval. We then fine-tune on annotated data to create EREDAT (Ensembled Representations for Evaluation of DAta-to-Text), a similarity metric between English text and KB graphs. EREDAT outperforms or matches state-of-the-art metrics in terms of correlation with human judgments on WebNLG even though, unlike them, it does not require a reference text to compare against.
A Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset from the Wikipedia Current Events Portal
Multi-document summarization (MDS) aims to compress the content in large document collections into short summaries and has important applications in story clustering for newsfeeds, presentation of search results, and timeline generation. However, there is a lack of datasets that realistically address such use cases at a scale large enough for training supervised models for this task. This work presents a new dataset for MDS that is large both in the total number of document clusters and in the size of individual clusters. We build this dataset by leveraging the Wikipedia Current Events Portal (WCEP), which provides concise and neutral human-written summaries of news events, with links to external source articles. We also automatically extend these source articles by looking for related articles in the Common Crawl archive. We provide a quantitative analysis of the dataset and empirical results for several state-of-the-art MDS techniques.
BioMamba: A Pre-trained Biomedical Language Representation Model Leveraging Mamba
The advancement of natural language processing (NLP) in biology hinges on models' ability to interpret intricate biomedical literature. Traditional models often struggle with the complex and domain-specific language in this field. In this paper, we present BioMamba, a pre-trained model specifically designed for biomedical text mining. BioMamba builds upon the Mamba architecture and is pre-trained on an extensive corpus of biomedical literature. Our empirical studies demonstrate that BioMamba significantly outperforms models like BioBERT and general-domain Mamba across various biomedical tasks. For instance, BioMamba achieves a 100 times reduction in perplexity and a 4 times reduction in cross-entropy loss on the BioASQ test set. We provide an overview of the model architecture, pre-training process, and fine-tuning techniques. Additionally, we release the code and trained model to facilitate further research.
WebUI: A Dataset for Enhancing Visual UI Understanding with Web Semantics
Modeling user interfaces (UIs) from visual information allows systems to make inferences about the functionality and semantics needed to support use cases in accessibility, app automation, and testing. Current datasets for training machine learning models are limited in size due to the costly and time-consuming process of manually collecting and annotating UIs. We crawled the web to construct WebUI, a large dataset of 400,000 rendered web pages associated with automatically extracted metadata. We analyze the composition of WebUI and show that while automatically extracted data is noisy, most examples meet basic criteria for visual UI modeling. We applied several strategies for incorporating semantics found in web pages to increase the performance of visual UI understanding models in the mobile domain, where less labeled data is available: (i) element detection, (ii) screen classification and (iii) screen similarity.
Text and Code Embeddings by Contrastive Pre-Training
Text embeddings are useful features in many applications such as semantic search and computing text similarity. Previous work typically trains models customized for different use cases, varying in dataset choice, training objective and model architecture. In this work, we show that contrastive pre-training on unsupervised data at scale leads to high quality vector representations of text and code. The same unsupervised text embeddings that achieve new state-of-the-art results in linear-probe classification also display impressive semantic search capabilities and sometimes even perform competitively with fine-tuned models. On linear-probe classification accuracy averaging over 7 tasks, our best unsupervised model achieves a relative improvement of 4% and 1.8% over previous best unsupervised and supervised text embedding models respectively. The same text embeddings when evaluated on large-scale semantic search attains a relative improvement of 23.4%, 14.7%, and 10.6% over previous best unsupervised methods on MSMARCO, Natural Questions and TriviaQA benchmarks, respectively. Similarly to text embeddings, we train code embedding models on (text, code) pairs, obtaining a 20.8% relative improvement over prior best work on code search.
SPIQA: A Dataset for Multimodal Question Answering on Scientific Papers
Seeking answers to questions within long scientific research articles is a crucial area of study that aids readers in quickly addressing their inquiries. However, existing question-answering (QA) datasets based on scientific papers are limited in scale and focus solely on textual content. To address this limitation, we introduce SPIQA (Scientific Paper Image Question Answering), the first large-scale QA dataset specifically designed to interpret complex figures and tables within the context of scientific research articles across various domains of computer science. Leveraging the breadth of expertise and ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to understand figures, we employ automatic and manual curation to create the dataset. We craft an information-seeking task involving multiple images that cover a wide variety of plots, charts, tables, schematic diagrams, and result visualizations. SPIQA comprises 270K questions divided into training, validation, and three different evaluation splits. Through extensive experiments with 12 prominent foundational models, we evaluate the ability of current multimodal systems to comprehend the nuanced aspects of research articles. Additionally, we propose a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation strategy with in-context retrieval that allows fine-grained, step-by-step assessment and improves model performance. We further explore the upper bounds of performance enhancement with additional textual information, highlighting its promising potential for future research and the dataset's impact on revolutionizing how we interact with scientific literature.
The ROOTS Search Tool: Data Transparency for LLMs
ROOTS is a 1.6TB multilingual text corpus developed for the training of BLOOM, currently the largest language model explicitly accompanied by commensurate data governance efforts. In continuation of these efforts, we present the ROOTS Search Tool: a search engine over the entire ROOTS corpus offering both fuzzy and exact search capabilities. ROOTS is the largest corpus to date that can be investigated this way. The ROOTS Search Tool is open-sourced and available on Hugging Face Spaces. We describe our implementation and the possible use cases of our tool.
GenAI Content Detection Task 3: Cross-Domain Machine-Generated Text Detection Challenge
Recently there have been many shared tasks targeting the detection of generated text from Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these shared tasks tend to focus either on cases where text is limited to one particular domain or cases where text can be from many domains, some of which may not be seen during test time. In this shared task, using the newly released RAID benchmark, we aim to answer whether or not models can detect generated text from a large, yet fixed, number of domains and LLMs, all of which are seen during training. Over the course of three months, our task was attempted by 9 teams with 23 detector submissions. We find that multiple participants were able to obtain accuracies of over 99% on machine-generated text from RAID while maintaining a 5% False Positive Rate -- suggesting that detectors are able to robustly detect text from many domains and models simultaneously. We discuss potential interpretations of this result and provide directions for future research.
Assessing In-context Learning and Fine-tuning for Topic Classification of German Web Data
Researchers in the political and social sciences often rely on classification models to analyze trends in information consumption by examining browsing histories of millions of webpages. Automated scalable methods are necessary due to the impracticality of manual labeling. In this paper, we model the detection of topic-related content as a binary classification task and compare the accuracy of fine-tuned pre-trained encoder models against in-context learning strategies. Using only a few hundred annotated data points per topic, we detect content related to three German policies in a database of scraped webpages. We compare multilingual and monolingual models, as well as zero and few-shot approaches, and investigate the impact of negative sampling strategies and the combination of URL & content-based features. Our results show that a small sample of annotated data is sufficient to train an effective classifier. Fine-tuning encoder-based models yields better results than in-context learning. Classifiers using both URL & content-based features perform best, while using URLs alone provides adequate results when content is unavailable.
STaRK: Benchmarking LLM Retrieval on Textual and Relational Knowledge Bases
Answering real-world user queries, such as product search, often requires accurate retrieval of information from semi-structured knowledge bases or databases that involve blend of unstructured (e.g., textual descriptions of products) and structured (e.g., entity relations of products) information. However, previous works have mostly studied textual and relational retrieval tasks as separate topics. To address the gap, we develop STARK, a large-scale Semi-structure retrieval benchmark on Textual and Relational Knowledge Bases. We design a novel pipeline to synthesize natural and realistic user queries that integrate diverse relational information and complex textual properties, as well as their ground-truth answers. Moreover, we rigorously conduct human evaluation to validate the quality of our benchmark, which covers a variety of practical applications, including product recommendations, academic paper searches, and precision medicine inquiries. Our benchmark serves as a comprehensive testbed for evaluating the performance of retrieval systems, with an emphasis on retrieval approaches driven by large language models (LLMs). Our experiments suggest that the STARK datasets present significant challenges to the current retrieval and LLM systems, indicating the demand for building more capable retrieval systems that can handle both textual and relational aspects.
WCLD: Curated Large Dataset of Criminal Cases from Wisconsin Circuit Courts
Machine learning based decision-support tools in criminal justice systems are subjects of intense discussions and academic research. There are important open questions about the utility and fairness of such tools. Academic researchers often rely on a few small datasets that are not sufficient to empirically study various real-world aspects of these questions. In this paper, we contribute WCLD, a curated large dataset of 1.5 million criminal cases from circuit courts in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. We used reliable public data from 1970 to 2020 to curate attributes like prior criminal counts and recidivism outcomes. The dataset contains large number of samples from five racial groups, in addition to information like sex and age (at judgment and first offense). Other attributes in this dataset include neighborhood characteristics obtained from census data, detailed types of offense, charge severity, case decisions, sentence lengths, year of filing etc. We also provide pseudo-identifiers for judge, county and zipcode. The dataset will not only enable researchers to more rigorously study algorithmic fairness in the context of criminal justice, but also relate algorithmic challenges with various systemic issues. We also discuss in detail the process of constructing the dataset and provide a datasheet. The WCLD dataset is available at https://clezdata.github.io/wcld/.
Fine Tuning LLM for Enterprise: Practical Guidelines and Recommendations
There is a compelling necessity from enterprises for fine tuning LLMs (Large Language Models) o get them trained on proprietary domain knowledge. The challenge is to imbibe the LLMs with domain specific knowledge using the most optimial resource and cost and in the best possible time. Many enterprises rely on RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) which does not need LLMs to be ine-tuned but they are limited by the quality of vector databases and their retrieval capabilities rather than the intrinsic capabilities of the LLMs themselves. In our current work we focus on fine tuning LLaMA, an open source LLM using proprietary documents and code from an enterprise repository and use the fine tuned models to evaluate the quality of responses. As part of this work, we aim to guide beginners on how to start with fine tuning an LLM for documentation and code by making educated guesses on size of GPU required and options that are available for formatting the data. We also propose pre processing recipes for both documentation and code to prepare dataset in different formats. The proposed methods of data preparation for document datasets are forming paragraph chunks, forming question and answer pairs and forming keyword and paragraph chunk pairs. For code dataset we propose forming summary and function pairs. Further, we qualitatively evaluate the results of the models for domain specific queries. Finally, we also propose practical guidelines and recommendations for fine tuning LLMs.
TextMachina: Seamless Generation of Machine-Generated Text Datasets
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to high-quality Machine-Generated Text (MGT), giving rise to countless new use cases and applications. However, easy access to LLMs is posing new challenges due to misuse. To address malicious usage, researchers have released datasets to effectively train models on MGT-related tasks. Similar strategies are used to compile these datasets, but no tool currently unifies them. In this scenario, we introduce TextMachina, a modular and extensible Python framework, designed to aid in the creation of high-quality, unbiased datasets to build robust models for MGT-related tasks such as detection, attribution, or boundary detection. It provides a user-friendly pipeline that abstracts away the inherent intricacies of building MGT datasets, such as LLM integrations, prompt templating, and bias mitigation. The quality of the datasets generated by TextMachina has been assessed in previous works, including shared tasks where more than one hundred teams trained robust MGT detectors.
OpenNER 1.0: Standardized Open-Access Named Entity Recognition Datasets in 50+ Languages
We present OpenNER 1.0, a standardized collection of openly available named entity recognition (NER) datasets. OpenNER contains 34 datasets spanning 51 languages, annotated in varying named entity ontologies. We correct annotation format issues, standardize the original datasets into a uniform representation, map entity type names to be more consistent across corpora, and provide the collection in a structure that enables research in multilingual and multi-ontology NER. We provide baseline models using three pretrained multilingual language models to compare the performance of recent models and facilitate future research in NER.
German Text Embedding Clustering Benchmark
This work introduces a benchmark assessing the performance of clustering German text embeddings in different domains. This benchmark is driven by the increasing use of clustering neural text embeddings in tasks that require the grouping of texts (such as topic modeling) and the need for German resources in existing benchmarks. We provide an initial analysis for a range of pre-trained mono- and multilingual models evaluated on the outcome of different clustering algorithms. Results include strong performing mono- and multilingual models. Reducing the dimensions of embeddings can further improve clustering. Additionally, we conduct experiments with continued pre-training for German BERT models to estimate the benefits of this additional training. Our experiments suggest that significant performance improvements are possible for short text. All code and datasets are publicly available.
Datasets: A Community Library for Natural Language Processing
The scale, variety, and quantity of publicly-available NLP datasets has grown rapidly as researchers propose new tasks, larger models, and novel benchmarks. Datasets is a community library for contemporary NLP designed to support this ecosystem. Datasets aims to standardize end-user interfaces, versioning, and documentation, while providing a lightweight front-end that behaves similarly for small datasets as for internet-scale corpora. The design of the library incorporates a distributed, community-driven approach to adding datasets and documenting usage. After a year of development, the library now includes more than 650 unique datasets, has more than 250 contributors, and has helped support a variety of novel cross-dataset research projects and shared tasks. The library is available at https://github.com/huggingface/datasets.
DOLFIN -- Document-Level Financial test set for Machine Translation
Despite the strong research interest in document-level Machine Translation (MT), the test sets dedicated to this task are still scarce. The existing test sets mainly cover topics from the general domain and fall short on specialised domains, such as legal and financial. Also, in spite of their document-level aspect, they still follow a sentence-level logic that does not allow for including certain linguistic phenomena such as information reorganisation. In this work, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a novel test set: DOLFIN. The dataset is built from specialised financial documents, and it makes a step towards true document-level MT by abandoning the paradigm of perfectly aligned sentences, presenting data in units of sections rather than sentences. The test set consists of an average of 1950 aligned sections for five language pairs. We present a detailed data collection pipeline that can serve as inspiration for aligning new document-level datasets. We demonstrate the usefulness and quality of this test set by evaluating a number of models. Our results show that the test set is able to discriminate between context-sensitive and context-agnostic models and shows the weaknesses when models fail to accurately translate financial texts. The test set is made public for the community.
Theme-driven Keyphrase Extraction to Analyze Social Media Discourse
Social media platforms are vital resources for sharing self-reported health experiences, offering rich data on various health topics. Despite advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) enabling large-scale social media data analysis, a gap remains in applying keyphrase extraction to health-related content. Keyphrase extraction is used to identify salient concepts in social media discourse without being constrained by predefined entity classes. This paper introduces a theme-driven keyphrase extraction framework tailored for social media, a pioneering approach designed to capture clinically relevant keyphrases from user-generated health texts. Themes are defined as broad categories determined by the objectives of the extraction task. We formulate this novel task of theme-driven keyphrase extraction and demonstrate its potential for efficiently mining social media text for the use case of treatment for opioid use disorder. This paper leverages qualitative and quantitative analysis to demonstrate the feasibility of extracting actionable insights from social media data and efficiently extracting keyphrases using minimally supervised NLP models. Our contributions include the development of a novel data collection and curation framework for theme-driven keyphrase extraction and the creation of MOUD-Keyphrase, the first dataset of its kind comprising human-annotated keyphrases from a Reddit community. We also identify the scope of minimally supervised NLP models to extract keyphrases from social media data efficiently. Lastly, we found that a large language model (ChatGPT) outperforms unsupervised keyphrase extraction models, and we evaluate its efficacy in this task.
CoIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Code Information Retrieval Models
Despite the substantial success of Information Retrieval (IR) in various NLP tasks, most IR systems predominantly handle queries and corpora in natural language, neglecting the domain of code retrieval. Code retrieval is critically important yet remains under-explored, with existing methods and benchmarks inadequately representing the diversity of code in various domains and tasks. Addressing this gap, we present \name (Code Information Retrieval Benchmark), a robust and comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to assess code retrieval capabilities. \name comprises ten meticulously curated code datasets, spanning eight distinctive retrieval tasks across seven diverse domains. We first discuss the construction of \name and its diverse dataset composition. Further, we evaluate nine widely used retrieval models using \name, uncovering significant difficulties in performing code retrieval tasks even with state-of-the-art systems. To facilitate easy adoption and integration within existing research workflows, \name has been developed as a user-friendly Python framework, readily installable via pip. It shares same data schema as other popular benchmarks like MTEB and BEIR, enabling seamless cross-benchmark evaluations. Through \name, we aim to invigorate research in the code retrieval domain, providing a versatile benchmarking tool that encourages further development and exploration of code retrieval systems\url{ https://github.com/CoIR-team/coir}.
BookSQL: A Large Scale Text-to-SQL Dataset for Accounting Domain
Several large-scale datasets (e.g., WikiSQL, Spider) for developing natural language interfaces to databases have recently been proposed. These datasets cover a wide breadth of domains but fall short on some essential domains, such as finance and accounting. Given that accounting databases are used worldwide, particularly by non-technical people, there is an imminent need to develop models that could help extract information from accounting databases via natural language queries. In this resource paper, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a new large-scale Text-to-SQL dataset for the accounting and financial domain: BookSQL. The dataset consists of 100k natural language queries-SQL pairs, and accounting databases of 1 million records. We experiment with and analyze existing state-of-the-art models (including GPT-4) for the Text-to-SQL task on BookSQL. We find significant performance gaps, thus pointing towards developing more focused models for this domain.
What's In My Big Data?
Large text corpora are the backbone of language models. However, we have a limited understanding of the content of these corpora, including general statistics, quality, social factors, and inclusion of evaluation data (contamination). In this work, we propose What's In My Big Data? (WIMBD), a platform and a set of sixteen analyses that allow us to reveal and compare the contents of large text corpora. WIMBD builds on two basic capabilities -- count and search -- at scale, which allows us to analyze more than 35 terabytes on a standard compute node. We apply WIMBD to ten different corpora used to train popular language models, including C4, The Pile, and RedPajama. Our analysis uncovers several surprising and previously undocumented findings about these corpora, including the high prevalence of duplicate, synthetic, and low-quality content, personally identifiable information, toxic language, and benchmark contamination. For instance, we find that about 50% of the documents in RedPajama and LAION-2B-en are duplicates. In addition, several datasets used for benchmarking models trained on such corpora are contaminated with respect to important benchmarks, including the Winograd Schema Challenge and parts of GLUE and SuperGLUE. We open-source WIMBD's code and artifacts to provide a standard set of evaluations for new text-based corpora and to encourage more analyses and transparency around them: github.com/allenai/wimbd.
Searching by Code: a New SearchBySnippet Dataset and SnippeR Retrieval Model for Searching by Code Snippets
Code search is an important task that has seen many developments in recent years. However, previous attempts have mostly considered the problem of searching for code by a text query. We argue that using a code snippet (and possibly an associated traceback) as a query and looking for answers with bugfixing instructions and code samples is a natural use case that is not covered by existing approaches. Moreover, existing datasets use comments extracted from code rather than full-text descriptions as text, making them unsuitable for this use case. We present a new SearchBySnippet dataset implementing the search-by-code use case based on StackOverflow data; it turns out that in this setting, existing architectures fall short of the simplest BM25 baseline even after fine-tuning. We present a new single encoder model SnippeR that outperforms several strong baselines on the SearchBySnippet dataset with a result of 0.451 Recall@10; we propose the SearchBySnippet dataset and SnippeR as a new important benchmark for code search evaluation.
Learning to Generate Novel Scientific Directions with Contextualized Literature-based Discovery
Literature-Based Discovery (LBD) aims to discover new scientific knowledge by mining papers and generating hypotheses. Standard LBD is limited to predicting pairwise relations between discrete concepts (e.g., drug-disease links), and ignores critical contexts like experimental settings (e.g., a specific patient population where a drug is evaluated) and background motivations (e.g., to find drugs without specific side effects). We address these limitations with a novel formulation of contextualized-LBD (C-LBD): generating scientific hypotheses in natural language, while grounding them in a context that controls the hypothesis search space. We present a modeling framework using retrieval of ``inspirations'' from past scientific papers. Our evaluations reveal that GPT-4 tends to generate ideas with overall low technical depth and novelty, while our inspiration prompting approaches partially mitigate this issue. Our work represents a first step toward building language models that generate new ideas derived from scientific literature.
Analyzing the Influence of Fake News in the 2024 Elections: A Comprehensive Dataset
This work introduces a dataset focused on fake news in US political speeches, specifically examining racial slurs and biases. By scraping and annotating 40,000 news articles, using advanced NLP tools and human verification, we provide a nuanced understanding of misinformation in political discourse. The dataset, designed for machine learning and bias analysis, is a critical resource for researchers, policymakers, and educators. It facilitates the development of strategies against misinformation and enhances media literacy, marking a significant contribution to the study of fake news and political communication. Our dataset, focusing on the analysis of fake news in the context of the 2024 elections, is publicly accessible for community to work on fake news identification. Our dataset, focusing on the analysis of fake news in the context of the 2024 elections, is publicly accessible.
DarkBERT: A Language Model for the Dark Side of the Internet
Recent research has suggested that there are clear differences in the language used in the Dark Web compared to that of the Surface Web. As studies on the Dark Web commonly require textual analysis of the domain, language models specific to the Dark Web may provide valuable insights to researchers. In this work, we introduce DarkBERT, a language model pretrained on Dark Web data. We describe the steps taken to filter and compile the text data used to train DarkBERT to combat the extreme lexical and structural diversity of the Dark Web that may be detrimental to building a proper representation of the domain. We evaluate DarkBERT and its vanilla counterpart along with other widely used language models to validate the benefits that a Dark Web domain specific model offers in various use cases. Our evaluations show that DarkBERT outperforms current language models and may serve as a valuable resource for future research on the Dark Web.
IAM: A Comprehensive and Large-Scale Dataset for Integrated Argument Mining Tasks
Traditionally, a debate usually requires a manual preparation process, including reading plenty of articles, selecting the claims, identifying the stances of the claims, seeking the evidence for the claims, etc. As the AI debate attracts more attention these years, it is worth exploring the methods to automate the tedious process involved in the debating system. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive and large dataset named IAM, which can be applied to a series of argument mining tasks, including claim extraction, stance classification, evidence extraction, etc. Our dataset is collected from over 1k articles related to 123 topics. Near 70k sentences in the dataset are fully annotated based on their argument properties (e.g., claims, stances, evidence, etc.). We further propose two new integrated argument mining tasks associated with the debate preparation process: (1) claim extraction with stance classification (CESC) and (2) claim-evidence pair extraction (CEPE). We adopt a pipeline approach and an end-to-end method for each integrated task separately. Promising experimental results are reported to show the values and challenges of our proposed tasks, and motivate future research on argument mining.
Dataset of Quotation Attribution in German News Articles
Extracting who says what to whom is a crucial part in analyzing human communication in today's abundance of data such as online news articles. Yet, the lack of annotated data for this task in German news articles severely limits the quality and usability of possible systems. To remedy this, we present a new, freely available, creative-commons-licensed dataset for quotation attribution in German news articles based on WIKINEWS. The dataset provides curated, high-quality annotations across 1000 documents (250,000 tokens) in a fine-grained annotation schema enabling various downstream uses for the dataset. The annotations not only specify who said what but also how, in which context, to whom and define the type of quotation. We specify our annotation schema, describe the creation of the dataset and provide a quantitative analysis. Further, we describe suitable evaluation metrics, apply two existing systems for quotation attribution, discuss their results to evaluate the utility of our dataset and outline use cases of our dataset in downstream tasks.
Enhancing Assamese NLP Capabilities: Introducing a Centralized Dataset Repository
This paper introduces a centralized, open-source dataset repository designed to advance NLP and NMT for Assamese, a low-resource language. The repository, available at GitHub, supports various tasks like sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and machine translation by providing both pre-training and fine-tuning corpora. We review existing datasets, highlighting the need for standardized resources in Assamese NLP, and discuss potential applications in AI-driven research, such as LLMs, OCR, and chatbots. While promising, challenges like data scarcity and linguistic diversity remain. The repository aims to foster collaboration and innovation, promoting Assamese language research in the digital age.
Leveraging Large Language Models to Democratize Access to Costly Financial Datasets for Academic Research
Unequal access to costly datasets essential for empirical research has long hindered researchers from disadvantaged institutions, limiting their ability to contribute to their fields and advance their careers. Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to democratize data access by automating data collection from unstructured sources. We develop and evaluate a novel methodology using GPT-4o-mini within a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework to collect data from corporate disclosures. Our approach achieves human-level accuracy in collecting CEO pay ratios from approximately 10,000 proxy statements and Critical Audit Matters (CAMs) from more than 12,000 10-K filings, with LLM processing times of 9 and 40 minutes respectively, each at a cost under $10. This stands in stark contrast to the hundreds of hours needed for manual collection or the thousands of dollars required for commercial database subscriptions. To foster a more inclusive research community by empowering researchers with limited resources to explore new avenues of inquiry, we share our methodology and the resulting datasets.
Towards a Cleaner Document-Oriented Multilingual Crawled Corpus
The need for raw large raw corpora has dramatically increased in recent years with the introduction of transfer learning and semi-supervised learning methods to Natural Language Processing. And while there have been some recent attempts to manually curate the amount of data necessary to train large language models, the main way to obtain this data is still through automatic web crawling. In this paper we take the existing multilingual web corpus OSCAR and its pipeline Ungoliant that extracts and classifies data from Common Crawl at the line level, and propose a set of improvements and automatic annotations in order to produce a new document-oriented version of OSCAR that could prove more suitable to pre-train large generative language models as well as hopefully other applications in Natural Language Processing and Digital Humanities.
ACLSum: A New Dataset for Aspect-based Summarization of Scientific Publications
Extensive efforts in the past have been directed toward the development of summarization datasets. However, a predominant number of these resources have been (semi)-automatically generated, typically through web data crawling, resulting in subpar resources for training and evaluating summarization systems, a quality compromise that is arguably due to the substantial costs associated with generating ground-truth summaries, particularly for diverse languages and specialized domains. To address this issue, we present ACLSum, a novel summarization dataset carefully crafted and evaluated by domain experts. In contrast to previous datasets, ACLSum facilitates multi-aspect summarization of scientific papers, covering challenges, approaches, and outcomes in depth. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate the quality of our resource and the performance of models based on pretrained language models and state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). Additionally, we explore the effectiveness of extractive versus abstractive summarization within the scholarly domain on the basis of automatically discovered aspects. Our results corroborate previous findings in the general domain and indicate the general superiority of end-to-end aspect-based summarization. Our data is released at https://github.com/sobamchan/aclsum.
POLYGLOT-NER: Massive Multilingual Named Entity Recognition
The increasing diversity of languages used on the web introduces a new level of complexity to Information Retrieval (IR) systems. We can no longer assume that textual content is written in one language or even the same language family. In this paper, we demonstrate how to build massive multilingual annotators with minimal human expertise and intervention. We describe a system that builds Named Entity Recognition (NER) annotators for 40 major languages using Wikipedia and Freebase. Our approach does not require NER human annotated datasets or language specific resources like treebanks, parallel corpora, and orthographic rules. The novelty of approach lies therein - using only language agnostic techniques, while achieving competitive performance. Our method learns distributed word representations (word embeddings) which encode semantic and syntactic features of words in each language. Then, we automatically generate datasets from Wikipedia link structure and Freebase attributes. Finally, we apply two preprocessing stages (oversampling and exact surface form matching) which do not require any linguistic expertise. Our evaluation is two fold: First, we demonstrate the system performance on human annotated datasets. Second, for languages where no gold-standard benchmarks are available, we propose a new method, distant evaluation, based on statistical machine translation.
TeleQnA: A Benchmark Dataset to Assess Large Language Models Telecommunications Knowledge
We introduce TeleQnA, the first benchmark dataset designed to evaluate the knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) in telecommunications. Comprising 10,000 questions and answers, this dataset draws from diverse sources, including standards and research articles. This paper outlines the automated question generation framework responsible for creating this dataset, along with how human input was integrated at various stages to ensure the quality of the questions. Afterwards, using the provided dataset, an evaluation is conducted to assess the capabilities of LLMs, including GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. The results highlight that these models struggle with complex standards related questions but exhibit proficiency in addressing general telecom-related inquiries. Additionally, our results showcase how incorporating telecom knowledge context significantly enhances their performance, thus shedding light on the need for a specialized telecom foundation model. Finally, the dataset is shared with active telecom professionals, whose performance is subsequently benchmarked against that of the LLMs. The findings illustrate that LLMs can rival the performance of active professionals in telecom knowledge, thanks to their capacity to process vast amounts of information, underscoring the potential of LLMs within this domain. The dataset has been made publicly accessible on GitHub.
A comprehensive review of automatic text summarization techniques: method, data, evaluation and coding
We provide a literature review about Automatic Text Summarization (ATS) systems. We consider a citation-based approach. We start with some popular and well-known papers that we have in hand about each topic we want to cover and we have tracked the "backward citations" (papers that are cited by the set of papers we knew beforehand) and the "forward citations" (newer papers that cite the set of papers we knew beforehand). In order to organize the different methods, we present the diverse approaches to ATS guided by the mechanisms they use to generate a summary. Besides presenting the methods, we also present an extensive review of the datasets available for summarization tasks and the methods used to evaluate the quality of the summaries. Finally, we present an empirical exploration of these methods using the CNN Corpus dataset that provides golden summaries for extractive and abstractive methods.
ENT-DESC: Entity Description Generation by Exploring Knowledge Graph
Previous works on knowledge-to-text generation take as input a few RDF triples or key-value pairs conveying the knowledge of some entities to generate a natural language description. Existing datasets, such as WIKIBIO, WebNLG, and E2E, basically have a good alignment between an input triple/pair set and its output text. However, in practice, the input knowledge could be more than enough, since the output description may only cover the most significant knowledge. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale and challenging dataset to facilitate the study of such a practical scenario in KG-to-text. Our dataset involves retrieving abundant knowledge of various types of main entities from a large knowledge graph (KG), which makes the current graph-to-sequence models severely suffer from the problems of information loss and parameter explosion while generating the descriptions. We address these challenges by proposing a multi-graph structure that is able to represent the original graph information more comprehensively. Furthermore, we also incorporate aggregation methods that learn to extract the rich graph information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model architecture.
When Less is More: Investigating Data Pruning for Pretraining LLMs at Scale
Large volumes of text data have contributed significantly to the development of large language models (LLMs) in recent years. This data is typically acquired by scraping the internet, leading to pretraining datasets comprised of noisy web text. To date, efforts to prune these datasets down to a higher quality subset have relied on hand-crafted heuristics encoded as rule-based filters. In this work, we take a wider view and explore scalable estimates of data quality that can be used to systematically measure the quality of pretraining data. We perform a rigorous comparison at scale of the simple data quality estimator of perplexity, as well as more sophisticated and computationally intensive estimates of the Error L2-Norm and memorization. These metrics are used to rank and prune pretraining corpora, and we subsequently compare LLMs trained on these pruned datasets. Surprisingly, we find that the simple technique of perplexity outperforms our more computationally expensive scoring methods. We improve over our no-pruning baseline while training on as little as 30% of the original training dataset. Our work sets the foundation for unexplored strategies in automatically curating high quality corpora and suggests the majority of pretraining data can be removed while retaining performance.
Word Embeddings from Large-Scale Greek Web Content
Word embeddings are undoubtedly very useful components in many NLP tasks. In this paper, we present word embeddings and other linguistic resources trained on the largest to date digital Greek language corpus. We also present a live web tool for testing the Greek word embeddings, by offering "analogy", "similarity score" and "most similar words" functions. Through our explorer, one could interact with the Greek word vectors.
AI4Bharat-IndicNLP Corpus: Monolingual Corpora and Word Embeddings for Indic Languages
We present the IndicNLP corpus, a large-scale, general-domain corpus containing 2.7 billion words for 10 Indian languages from two language families. We share pre-trained word embeddings trained on these corpora. We create news article category classification datasets for 9 languages to evaluate the embeddings. We show that the IndicNLP embeddings significantly outperform publicly available pre-trained embedding on multiple evaluation tasks. We hope that the availability of the corpus will accelerate Indic NLP research. The resources are available at https://github.com/ai4bharat-indicnlp/indicnlp_corpus.
Making a MIRACL: Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages
MIRACL (Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages) is a multilingual dataset we have built for the WSDM 2023 Cup challenge that focuses on ad hoc retrieval across 18 different languages, which collectively encompass over three billion native speakers around the world. These languages have diverse typologies, originate from many different language families, and are associated with varying amounts of available resources -- including what researchers typically characterize as high-resource as well as low-resource languages. Our dataset is designed to support the creation and evaluation of models for monolingual retrieval, where the queries and the corpora are in the same language. In total, we have gathered over 700k high-quality relevance judgments for around 77k queries over Wikipedia in these 18 languages, where all assessments have been performed by native speakers hired by our team. Our goal is to spur research that will improve retrieval across a continuum of languages, thus enhancing information access capabilities for diverse populations around the world, particularly those that have been traditionally underserved. This overview paper describes the dataset and baselines that we share with the community. The MIRACL website is live at http://miracl.ai/.
Mapping distributional to model-theoretic semantic spaces: a baseline
Word embeddings have been shown to be useful across state-of-the-art systems in many natural language processing tasks, ranging from question answering systems to dependency parsing. (Herbelot and Vecchi, 2015) explored word embeddings and their utility for modeling language semantics. In particular, they presented an approach to automatically map a standard distributional semantic space onto a set-theoretic model using partial least squares regression. We show in this paper that a simple baseline achieves a +51% relative improvement compared to their model on one of the two datasets they used, and yields competitive results on the second dataset.
Vector representations of text data in deep learning
In this dissertation we report results of our research on dense distributed representations of text data. We propose two novel neural models for learning such representations. The first model learns representations at the document level, while the second model learns word-level representations. For document-level representations we propose Binary Paragraph Vector: a neural network models for learning binary representations of text documents, which can be used for fast document retrieval. We provide a thorough evaluation of these models and demonstrate that they outperform the seminal method in the field in the information retrieval task. We also report strong results in transfer learning settings, where our models are trained on a generic text corpus and then used to infer codes for documents from a domain-specific dataset. In contrast to previously proposed approaches, Binary Paragraph Vector models learn embeddings directly from raw text data. For word-level representations we propose Disambiguated Skip-gram: a neural network model for learning multi-sense word embeddings. Representations learned by this model can be used in downstream tasks, like part-of-speech tagging or identification of semantic relations. In the word sense induction task Disambiguated Skip-gram outperforms state-of-the-art models on three out of four benchmarks datasets. Our model has an elegant probabilistic interpretation. Furthermore, unlike previous models of this kind, it is differentiable with respect to all its parameters and can be trained with backpropagation. In addition to quantitative results, we present qualitative evaluation of Disambiguated Skip-gram, including two-dimensional visualisations of selected word-sense embeddings.
Wikidata-lite for Knowledge Extraction and Exploration
Wikidata is the largest collaborative general knowledge graph supported by a worldwide community. It includes many helpful topics for knowledge exploration and data science applications. However, due to the enormous size of Wikidata, it is challenging to retrieve a large amount of data with millions of results, make complex queries requiring large aggregation operations, or access too many statement references. This paper introduces our preliminary works on Wikidata-lite, a toolkit to build a database offline for knowledge extraction and exploration, e.g., retrieving item information, statements, provenances, or searching entities by their keywords and attributes. Wikidata-lite has high performance and memory efficiency, much faster than the official Wikidata SPARQL endpoint for big queries. The Wikidata-lite repository is available at https://github.com/phucty/wikidb.
LMSYS-Chat-1M: A Large-Scale Real-World LLM Conversation Dataset
Studying how people interact with large language models (LLMs) in real-world scenarios is increasingly important due to their widespread use in various applications. In this paper, we introduce LMSYS-Chat-1M, a large-scale dataset containing one million real-world conversations with 25 state-of-the-art LLMs. This dataset is collected from 210K unique IP addresses in the wild on our Vicuna demo and Chatbot Arena website. We offer an overview of the dataset's content, including its curation process, basic statistics, and topic distribution, highlighting its diversity, originality, and scale. We demonstrate its versatility through four use cases: developing content moderation models that perform similarly to GPT-4, building a safety benchmark, training instruction-following models that perform similarly to Vicuna, and creating challenging benchmark questions. We believe that this dataset will serve as a valuable resource for understanding and advancing LLM capabilities. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/lmsys/lmsys-chat-1m.
DebateSum: A large-scale argument mining and summarization dataset
Prior work in Argument Mining frequently alludes to its potential applications in automatic debating systems. Despite this focus, almost no datasets or models exist which apply natural language processing techniques to problems found within competitive formal debate. To remedy this, we present the DebateSum dataset. DebateSum consists of 187,386 unique pieces of evidence with corresponding argument and extractive summaries. DebateSum was made using data compiled by competitors within the National Speech and Debate Association over a 7-year period. We train several transformer summarization models to benchmark summarization performance on DebateSum. We also introduce a set of fasttext word-vectors trained on DebateSum called debate2vec. Finally, we present a search engine for this dataset which is utilized extensively by members of the National Speech and Debate Association today. The DebateSum search engine is available to the public here: http://www.debate.cards
TLDR: Extreme Summarization of Scientific Documents
We introduce TLDR generation, a new form of extreme summarization, for scientific papers. TLDR generation involves high source compression and requires expert background knowledge and understanding of complex domain-specific language. To facilitate study on this task, we introduce SciTLDR, a new multi-target dataset of 5.4K TLDRs over 3.2K papers. SciTLDR contains both author-written and expert-derived TLDRs, where the latter are collected using a novel annotation protocol that produces high-quality summaries while minimizing annotation burden. We propose CATTS, a simple yet effective learning strategy for generating TLDRs that exploits titles as an auxiliary training signal. CATTS improves upon strong baselines under both automated metrics and human evaluations. Data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/allenai/scitldr.
MFAQ: a Multilingual FAQ Dataset
In this paper, we present the first multilingual FAQ dataset publicly available. We collected around 6M FAQ pairs from the web, in 21 different languages. Although this is significantly larger than existing FAQ retrieval datasets, it comes with its own challenges: duplication of content and uneven distribution of topics. We adopt a similar setup as Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) and test various bi-encoders on this dataset. Our experiments reveal that a multilingual model based on XLM-RoBERTa achieves the best results, except for English. Lower resources languages seem to learn from one another as a multilingual model achieves a higher MRR than language-specific ones. Our qualitative analysis reveals the brittleness of the model on simple word changes. We publicly release our dataset, model and training script.
Text2KGBench: A Benchmark for Ontology-Driven Knowledge Graph Generation from Text
The recent advances in large language models (LLM) and foundation models with emergent capabilities have been shown to improve the performance of many NLP tasks. LLMs and Knowledge Graphs (KG) can complement each other such that LLMs can be used for KG construction or completion while existing KGs can be used for different tasks such as making LLM outputs explainable or fact-checking in Neuro-Symbolic manner. In this paper, we present Text2KGBench, a benchmark to evaluate the capabilities of language models to generate KGs from natural language text guided by an ontology. Given an input ontology and a set of sentences, the task is to extract facts from the text while complying with the given ontology (concepts, relations, domain/range constraints) and being faithful to the input sentences. We provide two datasets (i) Wikidata-TekGen with 10 ontologies and 13,474 sentences and (ii) DBpedia-WebNLG with 19 ontologies and 4,860 sentences. We define seven evaluation metrics to measure fact extraction performance, ontology conformance, and hallucinations by LLMs. Furthermore, we provide results for two baseline models, Vicuna-13B and Alpaca-LoRA-13B using automatic prompt generation from test cases. The baseline results show that there is room for improvement using both Semantic Web and Natural Language Processing techniques.
A standardized Project Gutenberg corpus for statistical analysis of natural language and quantitative linguistics
The use of Project Gutenberg (PG) as a text corpus has been extremely popular in statistical analysis of language for more than 25 years. However, in contrast to other major linguistic datasets of similar importance, no consensual full version of PG exists to date. In fact, most PG studies so far either consider only a small number of manually selected books, leading to potential biased subsets, or employ vastly different pre-processing strategies (often specified in insufficient details), raising concerns regarding the reproducibility of published results. In order to address these shortcomings, here we present the Standardized Project Gutenberg Corpus (SPGC), an open science approach to a curated version of the complete PG data containing more than 50,000 books and more than 3 times 10^9 word-tokens. Using different sources of annotated metadata, we not only provide a broad characterization of the content of PG, but also show different examples highlighting the potential of SPGC for investigating language variability across time, subjects, and authors. We publish our methodology in detail, the code to download and process the data, as well as the obtained corpus itself on 3 different levels of granularity (raw text, timeseries of word tokens, and counts of words). In this way, we provide a reproducible, pre-processed, full-size version of Project Gutenberg as a new scientific resource for corpus linguistics, natural language processing, and information retrieval.
Platypus: Quick, Cheap, and Powerful Refinement of LLMs
We present Platypus, a family of fine-tuned and merged Large Language Models (LLMs) that achieves the strongest performance and currently stands at first place in HuggingFace's Open LLM Leaderboard as of the release date of this work. In this work we describe (1) our curated dataset Open-Platypus, that is a subset of other open datasets and which we release to the public (2) our process of fine-tuning and merging LoRA modules in order to conserve the strong prior of pretrained LLMs, while bringing specific domain knowledge to the surface (3) our efforts in checking for test data leaks and contamination in the training data, which can inform future research. Specifically, the Platypus family achieves strong performance in quantitative LLM metrics across model sizes, topping the global Open LLM leaderboard while using just a fraction of the fine-tuning data and overall compute that are required for other state-of-the-art fine-tuned LLMs. In particular, a 13B Platypus model can be trained on a single A100 GPU using 25k questions in 5 hours. This is a testament of the quality of our Open-Platypus dataset, and opens opportunities for more improvements in the field. Project page: https://platypus-llm.github.io
A Framework For Refining Text Classification and Object Recognition from Academic Articles
With the widespread use of the internet, it has become increasingly crucial to extract specific information from vast amounts of academic articles efficiently. Data mining techniques are generally employed to solve this issue. However, data mining for academic articles is challenging since it requires automatically extracting specific patterns in complex and unstructured layout documents. Current data mining methods for academic articles employ rule-based(RB) or machine learning(ML) approaches. However, using rule-based methods incurs a high coding cost for complex typesetting articles. On the other hand, simply using machine learning methods requires annotation work for complex content types within the paper, which can be costly. Furthermore, only using machine learning can lead to cases where patterns easily recognized by rule-based methods are mistakenly extracted. To overcome these issues, from the perspective of analyzing the standard layout and typesetting used in the specified publication, we emphasize implementing specific methods for specific characteristics in academic articles. We have developed a novel Text Block Refinement Framework (TBRF), a machine learning and rule-based scheme hybrid. We used the well-known ACL proceeding articles as experimental data for the validation experiment. The experiment shows that our approach achieved over 95% classification accuracy and 90% detection accuracy for tables and figures.
LitSearch: A Retrieval Benchmark for Scientific Literature Search
Literature search questions, such as "where can I find research on the evaluation of consistency in generated summaries?" pose significant challenges for modern search engines and retrieval systems. These questions often require a deep understanding of research concepts and the ability to reason over entire articles. In this work, we introduce LitSearch, a retrieval benchmark comprising 597 realistic literature search queries about recent ML and NLP papers. LitSearch is constructed using a combination of (1) questions generated by GPT-4 based on paragraphs containing inline citations from research papers and (2) questions about recently published papers, manually written by their authors. All LitSearch questions were manually examined or edited by experts to ensure high quality. We extensively benchmark state-of-the-art retrieval models and also evaluate two LLM-based reranking pipelines. We find a significant performance gap between BM25 and state-of-the-art dense retrievers, with a 24.8% difference in absolute recall@5. The LLM-based reranking strategies further improve the best-performing dense retriever by 4.4%. Additionally, commercial search engines and research tools like Google Search perform poorly on LitSearch, lagging behind the best dense retriever by 32 points. Taken together, these results show that LitSearch is an informative new testbed for retrieval systems while catering to a real-world use case.
RKadiyala at SemEval-2024 Task 8: Black-Box Word-Level Text Boundary Detection in Partially Machine Generated Texts
With increasing usage of generative models for text generation and widespread use of machine generated texts in various domains, being able to distinguish between human written and machine generated texts is a significant challenge. While existing models and proprietary systems focus on identifying whether given text is entirely human written or entirely machine generated, only a few systems provide insights at sentence or paragraph level at likelihood of being machine generated at a non reliable accuracy level, working well only for a set of domains and generators. This paper introduces few reliable approaches for the novel task of identifying which part of a given text is machine generated at a word level while comparing results from different approaches and methods. We present a comparison with proprietary systems , performance of our model on unseen domains' and generators' texts. The findings reveal significant improvements in detection accuracy along with comparison on other aspects of detection capabilities. Finally we discuss potential avenues for improvement and implications of our work. The proposed model is also well suited for detecting which parts of a text are machine generated in outputs of Instruct variants of many LLMs.
CRAFT Your Dataset: Task-Specific Synthetic Dataset Generation Through Corpus Retrieval and Augmentation
Building high-quality datasets for specialized tasks is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process that often requires specialized domain knowledge. We propose Corpus Retrieval and Augmentation for Fine-Tuning (CRAFT), a method for generating synthetic datasets, given a small number of user-written few-shots that demonstrate the task to be performed. Given the few-shot examples, we use large-scale public web-crawled corpora and similarity-based document retrieval to find other relevant human-written documents. Lastly, instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) augment the retrieved documents into custom-formatted task samples, which then can be used for fine-tuning. We demonstrate that CRAFT can efficiently generate large-scale task-specific training datasets for four diverse tasks: biology question-answering (QA), medicine QA and commonsense QA as well as summarization. Our experiments show that CRAFT-based models outperform or achieve comparable performance to general LLMs for QA tasks, while CRAFT-based summarization models outperform models trained on human-curated data by 46 preference points.
Text-Tuple-Table: Towards Information Integration in Text-to-Table Generation via Global Tuple Extraction
The task of condensing large chunks of textual information into concise and structured tables has gained attention recently due to the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their potential benefit for downstream tasks, such as text summarization and text mining. Previous approaches often generate tables that directly replicate information from the text, limiting their applicability in broader contexts, as text-to-table generation in real-life scenarios necessitates information extraction, reasoning, and integration. However, there is a lack of both datasets and methodologies towards this task. In this paper, we introduce LiveSum, a new benchmark dataset created for generating summary tables of competitions based on real-time commentary texts. We evaluate the performances of state-of-the-art LLMs on this task in both fine-tuning and zero-shot settings, and additionally propose a novel pipeline called T^3(Text-Tuple-Table) to improve their performances. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LLMs still struggle with this task even after fine-tuning, while our approach can offer substantial performance gains without explicit training. Further analyses demonstrate that our method exhibits strong generalization abilities, surpassing previous approaches on several other text-to-table datasets. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/LiveSum-TTT.
ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge
Machine learning about language can be improved by supplying it with specific knowledge and sources of external information. We present here a new version of the linked open data resource ConceptNet that is particularly well suited to be used with modern NLP techniques such as word embeddings. ConceptNet is a knowledge graph that connects words and phrases of natural language with labeled edges. Its knowledge is collected from many sources that include expert-created resources, crowd-sourcing, and games with a purpose. It is designed to represent the general knowledge involved in understanding language, improving natural language applications by allowing the application to better understand the meanings behind the words people use. When ConceptNet is combined with word embeddings acquired from distributional semantics (such as word2vec), it provides applications with understanding that they would not acquire from distributional semantics alone, nor from narrower resources such as WordNet or DBPedia. We demonstrate this with state-of-the-art results on intrinsic evaluations of word relatedness that translate into improvements on applications of word vectors, including solving SAT-style analogies.
Querying Large Language Models with SQL
In many use-cases, information is stored in text but not available in structured data. However, extracting data from natural language text to precisely fit a schema, and thus enable querying, is a challenging task. With the rise of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), there is now an effective solution to store and use information extracted from massive corpora of text documents. Thus, we envision the use of SQL queries to cover a broad range of data that is not captured by traditional databases by tapping the information in LLMs. To ground this vision, we present Galois, a prototype based on a traditional database architecture, but with new physical operators for querying the underlying LLM. The main idea is to execute some operators of the the query plan with prompts that retrieve data from the LLM. For a large class of SQL queries, querying LLMs returns well structured relations, with encouraging qualitative results. Preliminary experimental results make pre-trained LLMs a promising addition to the field of database systems, introducing a new direction for hybrid query processing. However, we pinpoint several research challenges that must be addressed to build a DBMS that exploits LLMs. While some of these challenges necessitate integrating concepts from the NLP literature, others offer novel research avenues for the DB community.
Neural Pipeline for Zero-Shot Data-to-Text Generation
In data-to-text (D2T) generation, training on in-domain data leads to overfitting to the data representation and repeating training data noise. We examine how to avoid finetuning pretrained language models (PLMs) on D2T generation datasets while still taking advantage of surface realization capabilities of PLMs. Inspired by pipeline approaches, we propose to generate text by transforming single-item descriptions with a sequence of modules trained on general-domain text-based operations: ordering, aggregation, and paragraph compression. We train PLMs for performing these operations on a synthetic corpus WikiFluent which we build from English Wikipedia. Our experiments on two major triple-to-text datasets -- WebNLG and E2E -- show that our approach enables D2T generation from RDF triples in zero-shot settings.
Detecting Pretraining Data from Large Language Models
Although large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed, the data used to train them is rarely disclosed. Given the incredible scale of this data, up to trillions of tokens, it is all but certain that it includes potentially problematic text such as copyrighted materials, personally identifiable information, and test data for widely reported reference benchmarks. However, we currently have no way to know which data of these types is included or in what proportions. In this paper, we study the pretraining data detection problem: given a piece of text and black-box access to an LLM without knowing the pretraining data, can we determine if the model was trained on the provided text? To facilitate this study, we introduce a dynamic benchmark WIKIMIA that uses data created before and after model training to support gold truth detection. We also introduce a new detection method Min-K% Prob based on a simple hypothesis: an unseen example is likely to contain a few outlier words with low probabilities under the LLM, while a seen example is less likely to have words with such low probabilities. Min-K% Prob can be applied without any knowledge about the pretraining corpus or any additional training, departing from previous detection methods that require training a reference model on data that is similar to the pretraining data. Moreover, our experiments demonstrate that Min-K% Prob achieves a 7.4% improvement on WIKIMIA over these previous methods. We apply Min-K% Prob to two real-world scenarios, copyrighted book detection, and contaminated downstream example detection, and find it a consistently effective solution.
KoMultiText: Large-Scale Korean Text Dataset for Classifying Biased Speech in Real-World Online Services
With the growth of online services, the need for advanced text classification algorithms, such as sentiment analysis and biased text detection, has become increasingly evident. The anonymous nature of online services often leads to the presence of biased and harmful language, posing challenges to maintaining the health of online communities. This phenomenon is especially relevant in South Korea, where large-scale hate speech detection algorithms have not yet been broadly explored. In this paper, we introduce "KoMultiText", a new comprehensive, large-scale dataset collected from a well-known South Korean SNS platform. Our proposed dataset provides annotations including (1) Preferences, (2) Profanities, and (3) Nine types of Bias for the text samples, enabling multi-task learning for simultaneous classification of user-generated texts. Leveraging state-of-the-art BERT-based language models, our approach surpasses human-level accuracy across diverse classification tasks, as measured by various metrics. Beyond academic contributions, our work can provide practical solutions for real-world hate speech and bias mitigation, contributing directly to the improvement of online community health. Our work provides a robust foundation for future research aiming to improve the quality of online discourse and foster societal well-being. All source codes and datasets are publicly accessible at https://github.com/Dasol-Choi/KoMultiText.
TaTa: A Multilingual Table-to-Text Dataset for African Languages
Existing data-to-text generation datasets are mostly limited to English. To address this lack of data, we create Table-to-Text in African languages (TaTa), the first large multilingual table-to-text dataset with a focus on African languages. We created TaTa by transcribing figures and accompanying text in bilingual reports by the Demographic and Health Surveys Program, followed by professional translation to make the dataset fully parallel. TaTa includes 8,700 examples in nine languages including four African languages (Hausa, Igbo, Swahili, and Yor\`ub\'a) and a zero-shot test language (Russian). We additionally release screenshots of the original figures for future research on multilingual multi-modal approaches. Through an in-depth human evaluation, we show that TaTa is challenging for current models and that less than half the outputs from an mT5-XXL-based model are understandable and attributable to the source data. We further demonstrate that existing metrics perform poorly for TaTa and introduce learned metrics that achieve a high correlation with human judgments. We release all data and annotations at https://github.com/google-research/url-nlp.
A Dataset of Information-Seeking Questions and Answers Anchored in Research Papers
Readers of academic research papers often read with the goal of answering specific questions. Question Answering systems that can answer those questions can make consumption of the content much more efficient. However, building such tools requires data that reflect the difficulty of the task arising from complex reasoning about claims made in multiple parts of a paper. In contrast, existing information-seeking question answering datasets usually contain questions about generic factoid-type information. We therefore present QASPER, a dataset of 5,049 questions over 1,585 Natural Language Processing papers. Each question is written by an NLP practitioner who read only the title and abstract of the corresponding paper, and the question seeks information present in the full text. The questions are then answered by a separate set of NLP practitioners who also provide supporting evidence to answers. We find that existing models that do well on other QA tasks do not perform well on answering these questions, underperforming humans by at least 27 F1 points when answering them from entire papers, motivating further research in document-grounded, information-seeking QA, which our dataset is designed to facilitate.
SOLD: Sinhala Offensive Language Dataset
The widespread of offensive content online, such as hate speech and cyber-bullying, is a global phenomenon. This has sparked interest in the artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) communities, motivating the development of various systems trained to detect potentially harmful content automatically. These systems require annotated datasets to train the machine learning (ML) models. However, with a few notable exceptions, most datasets on this topic have dealt with English and a few other high-resource languages. As a result, the research in offensive language identification has been limited to these languages. This paper addresses this gap by tackling offensive language identification in Sinhala, a low-resource Indo-Aryan language spoken by over 17 million people in Sri Lanka. We introduce the Sinhala Offensive Language Dataset (SOLD) and present multiple experiments on this dataset. SOLD is a manually annotated dataset containing 10,000 posts from Twitter annotated as offensive and not offensive at both sentence-level and token-level, improving the explainability of the ML models. SOLD is the first large publicly available offensive language dataset compiled for Sinhala. We also introduce SemiSOLD, a larger dataset containing more than 145,000 Sinhala tweets, annotated following a semi-supervised approach.
Compositional Generalization for Natural Language Interfaces to Web APIs
This paper presents Okapi, a new dataset for Natural Language to executable web Application Programming Interfaces (NL2API). This dataset is in English and contains 22,508 questions and 9,019 unique API calls, covering three domains. We define new compositional generalization tasks for NL2API which explore the models' ability to extrapolate from simple API calls in the training set to new and more complex API calls in the inference phase. Also, the models are required to generate API calls that execute correctly as opposed to the existing approaches which evaluate queries with placeholder values. Our dataset is different than most of the existing compositional semantic parsing datasets because it is a non-synthetic dataset studying the compositional generalization in a low-resource setting. Okapi is a step towards creating realistic datasets and benchmarks for studying compositional generalization alongside the existing datasets and tasks. We report the generalization capabilities of sequence-to-sequence baseline models trained on a variety of the SCAN and Okapi datasets tasks. The best model achieves 15\% exact match accuracy when generalizing from simple API calls to more complex API calls. This highlights some challenges for future research. Okapi dataset and tasks are publicly available at https://aka.ms/nl2api/data.
UFineBench: Towards Text-based Person Retrieval with Ultra-fine Granularity
Existing text-based person retrieval datasets often have relatively coarse-grained text annotations. This hinders the model to comprehend the fine-grained semantics of query texts in real scenarios. To address this problem, we contribute a new benchmark named UFineBench for text-based person retrieval with ultra-fine granularity. Firstly, we construct a new dataset named UFine6926. We collect a large number of person images and manually annotate each image with two detailed textual descriptions, averaging 80.8 words each. The average word count is three to four times that of the previous datasets. In addition of standard in-domain evaluation, we also propose a special evaluation paradigm more representative of real scenarios. It contains a new evaluation set with cross domains, cross textual granularity and cross textual styles, named UFine3C, and a new evaluation metric for accurately measuring retrieval ability, named mean Similarity Distribution (mSD). Moreover, we propose CFAM, a more efficient algorithm especially designed for text-based person retrieval with ultra fine-grained texts. It achieves fine granularity mining by adopting a shared cross-modal granularity decoder and hard negative match mechanism. With standard in-domain evaluation, CFAM establishes competitive performance across various datasets, especially on our ultra fine-grained UFine6926. Furthermore, by evaluating on UFine3C, we demonstrate that training on our UFine6926 significantly improves generalization to real scenarios compared with other coarse-grained datasets. The dataset and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Zplusdragon/UFineBench.
Identifying Informational Sources in News Articles
News articles are driven by the informational sources journalists use in reporting. Modeling when, how and why sources get used together in stories can help us better understand the information we consume and even help journalists with the task of producing it. In this work, we take steps toward this goal by constructing the largest and widest-ranging annotated dataset, to date, of informational sources used in news writing. We show that our dataset can be used to train high-performing models for information detection and source attribution. We further introduce a novel task, source prediction, to study the compositionality of sources in news articles. We show good performance on this task, which we argue is an important proof for narrative science exploring the internal structure of news articles and aiding in planning-based language generation, and an important step towards a source-recommendation system to aid journalists.
When Can Models Learn From Explanations? A Formal Framework for Understanding the Roles of Explanation Data
Many methods now exist for conditioning model outputs on task instructions, retrieved documents, and user-provided explanations and feedback. Rather than relying solely on examples of task inputs and outputs, these approaches use valuable additional data for improving model correctness and aligning learned models with human priors. Meanwhile, a growing body of evidence suggests that some language models can (1) store a large amount of knowledge in their parameters, and (2) perform inference over tasks in textual inputs at test time. These results raise the possibility that, for some tasks, humans cannot explain to a model any more about the task than it already knows or could infer on its own. In this paper, we study the circumstances under which explanations of individual data points can (or cannot) improve modeling performance. In order to carefully control important properties of the data and explanations, we introduce a synthetic dataset for experiments, and we also make use of three existing datasets with explanations: e-SNLI, TACRED, and SemEval. We first give a formal framework for the available modeling approaches, in which explanation data can be used as model inputs, as targets, or as a prior. After arguing that the most promising role for explanation data is as model inputs, we propose to use a retrieval-based method and show that it solves our synthetic task with accuracies upwards of 95%, while baselines without explanation data achieve below 65% accuracy. We then identify properties of datasets for which retrieval-based modeling fails. With the three existing datasets, we find no improvements from explanation retrieval. Drawing on findings from our synthetic task, we suggest that at least one of six preconditions for successful modeling fails to hold with these datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/peterbhase/ExplanationRoles
Yseop at FinSim-3 Shared Task 2021: Specializing Financial Domain Learning with Phrase Representations
In this paper, we present our approaches for the FinSim-3 Shared Task 2021: Learning Semantic Similarities for the Financial Domain. The aim of this shared task is to correctly classify a list of given terms from the financial domain into the most relevant hypernym (or top-level) concept in an external ontology. For our system submission, we evaluate two methods: a Sentence-RoBERTa (SRoBERTa) embeddings model pre-trained on a custom corpus, and a dual word-sentence embeddings model that builds on the first method by improving the proposed baseline word embeddings construction using the FastText model to boost the classification performance. Our system ranks 2nd overall on both metrics, scoring 0.917 on Average Accuracy and 1.141 on Mean Rank.
A Multilingual Translator to SQL with Database Schema Pruning to Improve Self-Attention
Long sequences of text are challenging in the context of transformers, due to quadratic memory increase in the self-attention mechanism. As this issue directly affects the translation from natural language to SQL queries (as techniques usually take as input a concatenated text with the question and the database schema), we present techniques that allow long text sequences to be handled by transformers with up to 512 input tokens. We propose a training process with database schema pruning (removal of tables and columns names that are useless for the query of interest). In addition, we used a multilingual approach with the mT5-large model fine-tuned with a data-augmented Spider dataset in four languages simultaneously: English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. Our proposed technique used the Spider dataset and increased the exact set match accuracy results from 0.718 to 0.736 in a validation dataset (Dev). Source code, evaluations, and checkpoints are available at: https://github.com/C4AI/gap-text2sql.
TeClass: A Human-Annotated Relevance-based Headline Classification and Generation Dataset for Telugu
News headline generation is a crucial task in increasing productivity for both the readers and producers of news. This task can easily be aided by automated News headline-generation models. However, the presence of irrelevant headlines in scraped news articles results in sub-optimal performance of generation models. We propose that relevance-based headline classification can greatly aid the task of generating relevant headlines. Relevance-based headline classification involves categorizing news headlines based on their relevance to the corresponding news articles. While this task is well-established in English, it remains under-explored in low-resource languages like Telugu due to a lack of annotated data. To address this gap, we present TeClass, the first-ever human-annotated Telugu news headline classification dataset, containing 78,534 annotations across 26,178 article-headline pairs. We experiment with various baseline models and provide a comprehensive analysis of their results. We further demonstrate the impact of this work by fine-tuning various headline generation models using TeClass dataset. The headlines generated by the models fine-tuned on highly relevant article-headline pairs, showed about a 5 point increment in the ROUGE-L scores. To encourage future research, the annotated dataset as well as the annotation guidelines will be made publicly available.
The MERIT Dataset: Modelling and Efficiently Rendering Interpretable Transcripts
This paper introduces the MERIT Dataset, a multimodal (text + image + layout) fully labeled dataset within the context of school reports. Comprising over 400 labels and 33k samples, the MERIT Dataset is a valuable resource for training models in demanding Visually-rich Document Understanding (VrDU) tasks. By its nature (student grade reports), the MERIT Dataset can potentially include biases in a controlled way, making it a valuable tool to benchmark biases induced in Language Models (LLMs). The paper outlines the dataset's generation pipeline and highlights its main features in the textual, visual, layout, and bias domains. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we present a benchmark with token classification models, showing that the dataset poses a significant challenge even for SOTA models and that these would greatly benefit from including samples from the MERIT Dataset in their pretraining phase.
LLM-as-a-Coauthor: Can Mixed Human-Written and Machine-Generated Text Be Detected?
With the rapid development and widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs), the use of Machine-Generated Text (MGT) has become increasingly common, bringing with it potential risks, especially in terms of quality and integrity in fields like news, education, and science. Current research mainly focuses on purely MGT detection without adequately addressing mixed scenarios, including AI-revised Human-Written Text (HWT) or human-revised MGT. To tackle this challenge, we define mixtext, a form of mixed text involving both AI and human-generated content. Then, we introduce MixSet, the first dataset dedicated to studying these mixtext scenarios. Leveraging MixSet, we executed comprehensive experiments to assess the efficacy of prevalent MGT detectors in handling mixtext situations, evaluating their performance in terms of effectiveness, robustness, and generalization. Our findings reveal that existing detectors struggle to identify mixtext, particularly in dealing with subtle modifications and style adaptability. This research underscores the urgent need for more fine-grain detectors tailored for mixtext, offering valuable insights for future research. Code and Models are available at https://github.com/Dongping-Chen/MixSet.
LePaRD: A Large-Scale Dataset of Judges Citing Precedents
We present the Legal Passage Retrieval Dataset LePaRD. LePaRD is a massive collection of U.S. federal judicial citations to precedent in context. The dataset aims to facilitate work on legal passage prediction, a challenging practice-oriented legal retrieval and reasoning task. Legal passage prediction seeks to predict relevant passages from precedential court decisions given the context of a legal argument. We extensively evaluate various retrieval approaches on LePaRD, and find that classification appears to work best. However, we note that legal precedent prediction is a difficult task, and there remains significant room for improvement. We hope that by publishing LePaRD, we will encourage others to engage with a legal NLP task that promises to help expand access to justice by reducing the burden associated with legal research. A subset of the LePaRD dataset is freely available and the whole dataset will be released upon publication.
Fighting Bias with Bias: Promoting Model Robustness by Amplifying Dataset Biases
NLP models often rely on superficial cues known as dataset biases to achieve impressive performance, and can fail on examples where these biases do not hold. Recent work sought to develop robust, unbiased models by filtering biased examples from training sets. In this work, we argue that such filtering can obscure the true capabilities of models to overcome biases, which might never be removed in full from the dataset. We suggest that in order to drive the development of models robust to subtle biases, dataset biases should be amplified in the training set. We introduce an evaluation framework defined by a bias-amplified training set and an anti-biased test set, both automatically extracted from existing datasets. Experiments across three notions of bias, four datasets and two models show that our framework is substantially more challenging for models than the original data splits, and even more challenging than hand-crafted challenge sets. Our evaluation framework can use any existing dataset, even those considered obsolete, to test model robustness. We hope our work will guide the development of robust models that do not rely on superficial biases and correlations. To this end, we publicly release our code and data.
TAGLETS: A System for Automatic Semi-Supervised Learning with Auxiliary Data
Machine learning practitioners often have access to a spectrum of data: labeled data for the target task (which is often limited), unlabeled data, and auxiliary data, the many available labeled datasets for other tasks. We describe TAGLETS, a system built to study techniques for automatically exploiting all three types of data and creating high-quality, servable classifiers. The key components of TAGLETS are: (1) auxiliary data organized according to a knowledge graph, (2) modules encapsulating different methods for exploiting auxiliary and unlabeled data, and (3) a distillation stage in which the ensembled modules are combined into a servable model. We compare TAGLETS with state-of-the-art transfer learning and semi-supervised learning methods on four image classification tasks. Our study covers a range of settings, varying the amount of labeled data and the semantic relatedness of the auxiliary data to the target task. We find that the intelligent incorporation of auxiliary and unlabeled data into multiple learning techniques enables TAGLETS to match-and most often significantly surpass-these alternatives. TAGLETS is available as an open-source system at github.com/BatsResearch/taglets.
NNOSE: Nearest Neighbor Occupational Skill Extraction
The labor market is changing rapidly, prompting increased interest in the automatic extraction of occupational skills from text. With the advent of English benchmark job description datasets, there is a need for systems that handle their diversity well. We tackle the complexity in occupational skill datasets tasks -- combining and leveraging multiple datasets for skill extraction, to identify rarely observed skills within a dataset, and overcoming the scarcity of skills across datasets. In particular, we investigate the retrieval-augmentation of language models, employing an external datastore for retrieving similar skills in a dataset-unifying manner. Our proposed method, Nearest Neighbor Occupational Skill Extraction (NNOSE) effectively leverages multiple datasets by retrieving neighboring skills from other datasets in the datastore. This improves skill extraction without additional fine-tuning. Crucially, we observe a performance gain in predicting infrequent patterns, with substantial gains of up to 30\% span-F1 in cross-dataset settings.
MUSER: A Multi-View Similar Case Retrieval Dataset
Similar case retrieval (SCR) is a representative legal AI application that plays a pivotal role in promoting judicial fairness. However, existing SCR datasets only focus on the fact description section when judging the similarity between cases, ignoring other valuable sections (e.g., the court's opinion) that can provide insightful reasoning process behind. Furthermore, the case similarities are typically measured solely by the textual semantics of the fact descriptions, which may fail to capture the full complexity of legal cases from the perspective of legal knowledge. In this work, we present MUSER, a similar case retrieval dataset based on multi-view similarity measurement and comprehensive legal element with sentence-level legal element annotations. Specifically, we select three perspectives (legal fact, dispute focus, and law statutory) and build a comprehensive and structured label schema of legal elements for each of them, to enable accurate and knowledgeable evaluation of case similarities. The constructed dataset originates from Chinese civil cases and contains 100 query cases and 4,024 candidate cases. We implement several text classification algorithms for legal element prediction and various retrieval methods for retrieving similar cases on MUSER. The experimental results indicate that incorporating legal elements can benefit the performance of SCR models, but further efforts are still required to address the remaining challenges posed by MUSER. The source code and dataset are released at https://github.com/THUlawtech/MUSER.
GAIA Search: Hugging Face and Pyserini Interoperability for NLP Training Data Exploration
Noticing the urgent need to provide tools for fast and user-friendly qualitative analysis of large-scale textual corpora of the modern NLP, we propose to turn to the mature and well-tested methods from the domain of Information Retrieval (IR) - a research field with a long history of tackling TB-scale document collections. We discuss how Pyserini - a widely used toolkit for reproducible IR research can be integrated with the Hugging Face ecosystem of open-source AI libraries and artifacts. We leverage the existing functionalities of both platforms while proposing novel features further facilitating their integration. Our goal is to give NLP researchers tools that will allow them to develop retrieval-based instrumentation for their data analytics needs with ease and agility. We include a Jupyter Notebook-based walk through the core interoperability features, available on GitHub at https://github.com/huggingface/gaia. We then demonstrate how the ideas we present can be operationalized to create a powerful tool for qualitative data analysis in NLP. We present GAIA Search - a search engine built following previously laid out principles, giving access to four popular large-scale text collections. GAIA serves a dual purpose of illustrating the potential of methodologies we discuss but also as a standalone qualitative analysis tool that can be leveraged by NLP researchers aiming to understand datasets prior to using them in training. GAIA is hosted live on Hugging Face Spaces - https://huggingface.co/spaces/spacerini/gaia.
Multi-granular Legal Topic Classification on Greek Legislation
In this work, we study the task of classifying legal texts written in the Greek language. We introduce and make publicly available a novel dataset based on Greek legislation, consisting of more than 47 thousand official, categorized Greek legislation resources. We experiment with this dataset and evaluate a battery of advanced methods and classifiers, ranging from traditional machine learning and RNN-based methods to state-of-the-art Transformer-based methods. We show that recurrent architectures with domain-specific word embeddings offer improved overall performance while being competitive even to transformer-based models. Finally, we show that cutting-edge multilingual and monolingual transformer-based models brawl on the top of the classifiers' ranking, making us question the necessity of training monolingual transfer learning models as a rule of thumb. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the task of Greek legal text classification is considered in an open research project, while also Greek is a language with very limited NLP resources in general.
Towards Realistic Low-resource Relation Extraction: A Benchmark with Empirical Baseline Study
This paper presents an empirical study to build relation extraction systems in low-resource settings. Based upon recent pre-trained language models, we comprehensively investigate three schemes to evaluate the performance in low-resource settings: (i) different types of prompt-based methods with few-shot labeled data; (ii) diverse balancing methods to address the long-tailed distribution issue; (iii) data augmentation technologies and self-training to generate more labeled in-domain data. We create a benchmark with 8 relation extraction (RE) datasets covering different languages, domains and contexts and perform extensive comparisons over the proposed schemes with combinations. Our experiments illustrate: (i) Though prompt-based tuning is beneficial in low-resource RE, there is still much potential for improvement, especially in extracting relations from cross-sentence contexts with multiple relational triples; (ii) Balancing methods are not always helpful for RE with long-tailed distribution; (iii) Data augmentation complements existing baselines and can bring much performance gain, while self-training may not consistently achieve advancement to low-resource RE. Code and datasets are in https://github.com/zjunlp/LREBench.
ChemNLP: A Natural Language Processing based Library for Materials Chemistry Text Data
In this work, we present the ChemNLP library that can be used for 1) curating open access datasets for materials and chemistry literature, developing and comparing traditional machine learning, transformers and graph neural network models for 2) classifying and clustering texts, 3) named entity recognition for large-scale text-mining, 4) abstractive summarization for generating titles of articles from abstracts, 5) text generation for suggesting abstracts from titles, 6) integration with density functional theory dataset for identifying potential candidate materials such as superconductors, and 7) web-interface development for text and reference query. We primarily use the publicly available arXiv and Pubchem datasets but the tools can be used for other datasets as well. Moreover, as new models are developed, they can be easily integrated in the library. ChemNLP is available at the websites: https://github.com/usnistgov/chemnlp and https://jarvis.nist.gov/jarvischemnlp.
BookSum: A Collection of Datasets for Long-form Narrative Summarization
The majority of available text summarization datasets include short-form source documents that lack long-range causal and temporal dependencies, and often contain strong layout and stylistic biases. While relevant, such datasets will offer limited challenges for future generations of text summarization systems. We address these issues by introducing BookSum, a collection of datasets for long-form narrative summarization. Our dataset covers source documents from the literature domain, such as novels, plays and stories, and includes highly abstractive, human written summaries on three levels of granularity of increasing difficulty: paragraph-, chapter-, and book-level. The domain and structure of our dataset poses a unique set of challenges for summarization systems, which include: processing very long documents, non-trivial causal and temporal dependencies, and rich discourse structures. To facilitate future work, we trained and evaluated multiple extractive and abstractive summarization models as baselines for our dataset.
SynFinTabs: A Dataset of Synthetic Financial Tables for Information and Table Extraction
Table extraction from document images is a challenging AI problem, and labelled data for many content domains is difficult to come by. Existing table extraction datasets often focus on scientific tables due to the vast amount of academic articles that are readily available, along with their source code. However, there are significant layout and typographical differences between tables found across scientific, financial, and other domains. Current datasets often lack the words, and their positions, contained within the tables, instead relying on unreliable OCR to extract these features for training modern machine learning models on natural language processing tasks. Therefore, there is a need for a more general method of obtaining labelled data. We present SynFinTabs, a large-scale, labelled dataset of synthetic financial tables. Our hope is that our method of generating these synthetic tables is transferable to other domains. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset in training models to extract information from table images, we create FinTabQA, a layout large language model trained on an extractive question-answering task. We test our model using real-world financial tables and compare it to a state-of-the-art generative model and discuss the results. We make the dataset, model, and dataset generation code publicly available.
An Annotated Dataset of Coreference in English Literature
We present in this work a new dataset of coreference annotations for works of literature in English, covering 29,103 mentions in 210,532 tokens from 100 works of fiction. This dataset differs from previous coreference datasets in containing documents whose average length (2,105.3 words) is four times longer than other benchmark datasets (463.7 for OntoNotes), and contains examples of difficult coreference problems common in literature. This dataset allows for an evaluation of cross-domain performance for the task of coreference resolution, and analysis into the characteristics of long-distance within-document coreference.
The Uli Dataset: An Exercise in Experience Led Annotation of oGBV
Online gender based violence has grown concomitantly with adoption of the internet and social media. Its effects are worse in the Global majority where many users use social media in languages other than English. The scale and volume of conversations on the internet has necessitated the need for automated detection of hate speech, and more specifically gendered abuse. There is, however, a lack of language specific and contextual data to build such automated tools. In this paper we present a dataset on gendered abuse in three languages- Hindi, Tamil and Indian English. The dataset comprises of tweets annotated along three questions pertaining to the experience of gender abuse, by experts who identify as women or a member of the LGBTQIA community in South Asia. Through this dataset we demonstrate a participatory approach to creating datasets that drive AI systems.
Yankari: A Monolingual Yoruba Dataset
This paper presents Yankari, a large-scale monolingual dataset for the Yoruba language, aimed at addressing the critical gap in Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources for this important West African language. Despite being spoken by over 30 million people, Yoruba has been severely underrepresented in NLP research and applications. We detail our methodology for creating this dataset, which includes careful source selection, automated quality control, and rigorous data cleaning processes. The Yankari dataset comprises 51,407 documents from 13 diverse sources, totaling over 30 million tokens. Our approach focuses on ethical data collection practices, avoiding problematic sources and addressing issues prevalent in existing datasets. We provide thorough automated evaluations of the dataset, demonstrating its quality compared to existing resources. The Yankari dataset represents a significant advancement in Yoruba language resources, providing a foundation for developing more accurate NLP models, supporting comparative linguistic studies, and contributing to the digital accessibility of the Yoruba language.
Benchmarks for Pirá 2.0, a Reading Comprehension Dataset about the Ocean, the Brazilian Coast, and Climate Change
Pir\'a is a reading comprehension dataset focused on the ocean, the Brazilian coast, and climate change, built from a collection of scientific abstracts and reports on these topics. This dataset represents a versatile language resource, particularly useful for testing the ability of current machine learning models to acquire expert scientific knowledge. Despite its potential, a detailed set of baselines has not yet been developed for Pir\'a. By creating these baselines, researchers can more easily utilize Pir\'a as a resource for testing machine learning models across a wide range of question answering tasks. In this paper, we define six benchmarks over the Pir\'a dataset, covering closed generative question answering, machine reading comprehension, information retrieval, open question answering, answer triggering, and multiple choice question answering. As part of this effort, we have also produced a curated version of the original dataset, where we fixed a number of grammar issues, repetitions, and other shortcomings. Furthermore, the dataset has been extended in several new directions, so as to face the aforementioned benchmarks: translation of supporting texts from English into Portuguese, classification labels for answerability, automatic paraphrases of questions and answers, and multiple choice candidates. The results described in this paper provide several points of reference for researchers interested in exploring the challenges provided by the Pir\'a dataset.
SciCat: A Curated Dataset of Scientific Software Repositories
The proliferation of open-source scientific software for science and research presents opportunities and challenges. In this paper, we introduce the SciCat dataset -- a comprehensive collection of Free-Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects, designed to address the need for a curated repository of scientific and research software. This collection is crucial for understanding the creation of scientific software and aiding in its development. To ensure extensive coverage, our approach involves selecting projects from a pool of 131 million deforked repositories from the World of Code data source. Subsequently, we analyze README.md files using OpenAI's advanced language models. Our classification focuses on software designed for scientific purposes, research-related projects, and research support software. The SciCat dataset aims to become an invaluable tool for researching science-related software, shedding light on emerging trends, prevalent practices, and challenges in the field of scientific software development. Furthermore, it includes data that can be linked to the World of Code, GitHub, and other platforms, providing a solid foundation for conducting comparative studies between scientific and non-scientific software.
Toxicity of the Commons: Curating Open-Source Pre-Training Data
Open-source large language models are becoming increasingly available and popular among researchers and practitioners. While significant progress has been made on open-weight models, open training data is a practice yet to be adopted by the leading open-weight models creators. At the same time, there researchers are working to make language models safer. We propose a data curation pipeline to reduce harmful outputs by models trained on public domain data. There are unique challenges to working with public domain data, as these sources differ from web text in both form and content. Many sources are historical documents and are the result of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Consequently, current state-of-the-art approaches to toxicity filtering are often infeasible or inappropriate for open data models. In this paper, we introduce a new fully open-source pipeline for open-data toxicity filtering. Our contributions are threefold. We create a custom training dataset, ToxicCommons, which is composed of texts which have been classified across five different dimensions (racial/origin-based, gender/sex-based, religious, ability-based discrimination, and violence). We use this dataset to train a custom classifier, Celadon, that can be used to detect toxic content in open data more efficiently at a larger scale. Finally, we describe the balanced approach to content filtration that optimizes safety filtering with respect to the filtered data available for training.
SearchQA: A New Q&A Dataset Augmented with Context from a Search Engine
We publicly release a new large-scale dataset, called SearchQA, for machine comprehension, or question-answering. Unlike recently released datasets, such as DeepMind CNN/DailyMail and SQuAD, the proposed SearchQA was constructed to reflect a full pipeline of general question-answering. That is, we start not from an existing article and generate a question-answer pair, but start from an existing question-answer pair, crawled from J! Archive, and augment it with text snippets retrieved by Google. Following this approach, we built SearchQA, which consists of more than 140k question-answer pairs with each pair having 49.6 snippets on average. Each question-answer-context tuple of the SearchQA comes with additional meta-data such as the snippet's URL, which we believe will be valuable resources for future research. We conduct human evaluation as well as test two baseline methods, one simple word selection and the other deep learning based, on the SearchQA. We show that there is a meaningful gap between the human and machine performances. This suggests that the proposed dataset could well serve as a benchmark for question-answering.
Tweet Insights: A Visualization Platform to Extract Temporal Insights from Twitter
This paper introduces a large collection of time series data derived from Twitter, postprocessed using word embedding techniques, as well as specialized fine-tuned language models. This data comprises the past five years and captures changes in n-gram frequency, similarity, sentiment and topic distribution. The interface built on top of this data enables temporal analysis for detecting and characterizing shifts in meaning, including complementary information to trending metrics, such as sentiment and topic association over time. We release an online demo for easy experimentation, and we share code and the underlying aggregated data for future work. In this paper, we also discuss three case studies unlocked thanks to our platform, showcasing its potential for temporal linguistic analysis.
PublicHearingBR: A Brazilian Portuguese Dataset of Public Hearing Transcripts for Summarization of Long Documents
This paper introduces PublicHearingBR, a Brazilian Portuguese dataset designed for summarizing long documents. The dataset consists of transcripts of public hearings held by the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, paired with news articles and structured summaries containing the individuals participating in the hearing and their statements or opinions. The dataset supports the development and evaluation of long document summarization systems in Portuguese. Our contributions include the dataset, a hybrid summarization system to establish a baseline for future studies, and a discussion on evaluation metrics for summarization involving large language models, addressing the challenge of hallucination in the generated summaries. As a result of this discussion, the dataset also provides annotated data that can be used in Natural Language Inference tasks in Portuguese.
A Finnish News Corpus for Named Entity Recognition
We present a corpus of Finnish news articles with a manually prepared named entity annotation. The corpus consists of 953 articles (193,742 word tokens) with six named entity classes (organization, location, person, product, event, and date). The articles are extracted from the archives of Digitoday, a Finnish online technology news source. The corpus is available for research purposes. We present baseline experiments on the corpus using a rule-based and two deep learning systems on two, in-domain and out-of-domain, test sets.
EduQG: A Multi-format Multiple Choice Dataset for the Educational Domain
We introduce a high-quality dataset that contains 3,397 samples comprising (i) multiple choice questions, (ii) answers (including distractors), and (iii) their source documents, from the educational domain. Each question is phrased in two forms, normal and close. Correct answers are linked to source documents with sentence-level annotations. Thus, our versatile dataset can be used for both question and distractor generation, as well as to explore new challenges such as question format conversion. Furthermore, 903 questions are accompanied by their cognitive complexity level as per Bloom's taxonomy. All questions have been generated by educational experts rather than crowd workers to ensure they are maintaining educational and learning standards. Our analysis and experiments suggest distinguishable differences between our dataset and commonly used ones for question generation for educational purposes. We believe this new dataset can serve as a valuable resource for research and evaluation in the educational domain. The dataset and baselines will be released to support further research in question generation.
Article Reranking by Memory-Enhanced Key Sentence Matching for Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims
False claims that have been previously fact-checked can still spread on social media. To mitigate their continual spread, detecting previously fact-checked claims is indispensable. Given a claim, existing works focus on providing evidence for detection by reranking candidate fact-checking articles (FC-articles) retrieved by BM25. However, these performances may be limited because they ignore the following characteristics of FC-articles: (1) claims are often quoted to describe the checked events, providing lexical information besides semantics; (2) sentence templates to introduce or debunk claims are common across articles, providing pattern information. Models that ignore the two aspects only leverage semantic relevance and may be misled by sentences that describe similar but irrelevant events. In this paper, we propose a novel reranker, MTM (Memory-enhanced Transformers for Matching) to rank FC-articles using key sentences selected with event (lexical and semantic) and pattern information. For event information, we propose a ROUGE-guided Transformer which is finetuned with regression of ROUGE. For pattern information, we generate pattern vectors for matching with sentences. By fusing event and pattern information, we select key sentences to represent an article and then predict if the article fact-checks the given claim using the claim, key sentences, and patterns. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that MTM outperforms existing methods. Human evaluation proves that MTM can capture key sentences for explanations. The code and the dataset are at https://github.com/ICTMCG/MTM.
VTechAGP: An Academic-to-General-Audience Text Paraphrase Dataset and Benchmark Models
Existing text simplification or paraphrase datasets mainly focus on sentence-level text generation in a general domain. These datasets are typically developed without using domain knowledge. In this paper, we release a novel dataset, VTechAGP, which is the first academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset consisting of 4,938 document-level these and dissertation academic and general-audience abstract pairs from 8 colleges authored over 25 years. We also propose a novel dynamic soft prompt generative language model, DSPT5. For training, we leverage a contrastive-generative loss function to learn the keyword vectors in the dynamic prompt. For inference, we adopt a crowd-sampling decoding strategy at both semantic and structural levels to further select the best output candidate. We evaluate DSPT5 and various state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) from multiple perspectives. Results demonstrate that the SOTA LLMs does not provide satisfactory outcomes, while the lightweight DSPT5 can achieve competitive results. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to build a benchmark dataset and solutions for academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset.
Recovering document annotations for sentence-level bitext
Data availability limits the scope of any given task. In machine translation, historical models were incapable of handling longer contexts, so the lack of document-level datasets was less noticeable. Now, despite the emergence of long-sequence methods, we remain within a sentence-level paradigm and without data to adequately approach context-aware machine translation. Most large-scale datasets have been processed through a pipeline that discards document-level metadata. In this work, we reconstruct document-level information for three (ParaCrawl, News Commentary, and Europarl) large datasets in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese (paired with English). We then introduce a document-level filtering technique as an alternative to traditional bitext filtering. We present this filtering with analysis to show that this method prefers context-consistent translations rather than those that may have been sentence-level machine translated. Last we train models on these longer contexts and demonstrate improvement in document-level translation without degradation of sentence-level translation. We release our dataset, ParaDocs, and resulting models as a resource to the community.
Incubating Text Classifiers Following User Instruction with Nothing but LLM
In this paper, we aim to generate text classification data given arbitrary class definitions (i.e., user instruction), so one can train a small text classifier without any human annotation or raw corpus. Compared with pioneer attempts, our proposed Incubator is the first framework that can handle complicated and even mutually dependent classes (e.g., "TED Talk given by Educator" and "Other"). Specifically, Incubator is an LLM firstly tuned on the instruction-to-data mappings that we obtained from classification datasets and descriptions on HuggingFace together with in-context augmentation by GPT-4. We then refine Incubator by learning on the cluster centers of semantic textual embeddings to emphasize the uniformity and semantic diversity in generations. We compare Incubator on various classification tasks with strong baselines such as direct LLM-based inference and training data generation by prompt engineering. Experiments show Incubator is able to (1) perform well on traditional benchmarks, (2) take label dependency and user preference into consideration, and (3) enable logical text mining by incubating multiple classifiers.
Text Segmentation as a Supervised Learning Task
Text segmentation, the task of dividing a document into contiguous segments based on its semantic structure, is a longstanding challenge in language understanding. Previous work on text segmentation focused on unsupervised methods such as clustering or graph search, due to the paucity in labeled data. In this work, we formulate text segmentation as a supervised learning problem, and present a large new dataset for text segmentation that is automatically extracted and labeled from Wikipedia. Moreover, we develop a segmentation model based on this dataset and show that it generalizes well to unseen natural text.
Large Language Models(LLMs) on Tabular Data: Prediction, Generation, and Understanding -- A Survey
Recent breakthroughs in large language modeling have facilitated rigorous exploration of their application in diverse tasks related to tabular data modeling, such as prediction, tabular data synthesis, question answering, and table understanding. Each task presents unique challenges and opportunities. However, there is currently a lack of comprehensive review that summarizes and compares the key techniques, metrics, datasets, models, and optimization approaches in this research domain. This survey aims to address this gap by consolidating recent progress in these areas, offering a thorough survey and taxonomy of the datasets, metrics, and methodologies utilized. It identifies strengths, limitations, unexplored territories, and gaps in the existing literature, while providing some insights for future research directions in this vital and rapidly evolving field. It also provides relevant code and datasets references. Through this comprehensive review, we hope to provide interested readers with pertinent references and insightful perspectives, empowering them with the necessary tools and knowledge to effectively navigate and address the prevailing challenges in the field.
HiNER: A Large Hindi Named Entity Recognition Dataset
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a foundational NLP task that aims to provide class labels like Person, Location, Organisation, Time, and Number to words in free text. Named Entities can also be multi-word expressions where the additional I-O-B annotation information helps label them during the NER annotation process. While English and European languages have considerable annotated data for the NER task, Indian languages lack on that front -- both in terms of quantity and following annotation standards. This paper releases a significantly sized standard-abiding Hindi NER dataset containing 109,146 sentences and 2,220,856 tokens, annotated with 11 tags. We discuss the dataset statistics in all their essential detail and provide an in-depth analysis of the NER tag-set used with our data. The statistics of tag-set in our dataset show a healthy per-tag distribution, especially for prominent classes like Person, Location and Organisation. Since the proof of resource-effectiveness is in building models with the resource and testing the model on benchmark data and against the leader-board entries in shared tasks, we do the same with the aforesaid data. We use different language models to perform the sequence labelling task for NER and show the efficacy of our data by performing a comparative evaluation with models trained on another dataset available for the Hindi NER task. Our dataset helps achieve a weighted F1 score of 88.78 with all the tags and 92.22 when we collapse the tag-set, as discussed in the paper. To the best of our knowledge, no available dataset meets the standards of volume (amount) and variability (diversity), as far as Hindi NER is concerned. We fill this gap through this work, which we hope will significantly help NLP for Hindi. We release this dataset with our code and models at https://github.com/cfiltnlp/HiNER
WikiHow: A Large Scale Text Summarization Dataset
Sequence-to-sequence models have recently gained the state of the art performance in summarization. However, not too many large-scale high-quality datasets are available and almost all the available ones are mainly news articles with specific writing style. Moreover, abstractive human-style systems involving description of the content at a deeper level require data with higher levels of abstraction. In this paper, we present WikiHow, a dataset of more than 230,000 article and summary pairs extracted and constructed from an online knowledge base written by different human authors. The articles span a wide range of topics and therefore represent high diversity styles. We evaluate the performance of the existing methods on WikiHow to present its challenges and set some baselines to further improve it.
BanglishRev: A Large-Scale Bangla-English and Code-mixed Dataset of Product Reviews in E-Commerce
This work presents the BanglishRev Dataset, the largest e-commerce product review dataset to date for reviews written in Bengali, English, a mixture of both and Banglish, Bengali words written with English alphabets. The dataset comprises of 1.74 million written reviews from 3.2 million ratings information collected from a total of 128k products being sold in online e-commerce platforms targeting the Bengali population. It includes an extensive array of related metadata for each of the reviews including the rating given by the reviewer, date the review was posted and date of purchase, number of likes, dislikes, response from the seller, images associated with the review etc. With sentiment analysis being the most prominent usage of review datasets, experimentation with a binary sentiment analysis model with the review rating serving as an indicator of positive or negative sentiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the large amount of data presented in BanglishRev for sentiment analysis tasks. A BanglishBERT model is trained on the data from BanglishRev with reviews being considered labeled positive if the rating is greater than 3 and negative if the rating is less than or equal to 3. The model is evaluated by being testing against a previously published manually annotated dataset for e-commerce reviews written in a mixture of Bangla, English and Banglish. The experimental model achieved an exceptional accuracy of 94\% and F1 score of 0.94, demonstrating the dataset's efficacy for sentiment analysis. Some of the intriguing patterns and observations seen within the dataset and future research directions where the dataset can be utilized is also discussed and explored. The dataset can be accessed through https://huggingface.co/datasets/BanglishRev/bangla-english-and-code-mixed-ecommerce-review-dataset.
IndicLLMSuite: A Blueprint for Creating Pre-training and Fine-Tuning Datasets for Indian Languages
Despite the considerable advancements in English LLMs, the progress in building comparable models for other languages has been hindered due to the scarcity of tailored resources. Our work aims to bridge this divide by introducing an expansive suite of resources specifically designed for the development of Indic LLMs, covering 22 languages, containing a total of 251B tokens and 74.8M instruction-response pairs. Recognizing the importance of both data quality and quantity, our approach combines highly curated manually verified data, unverified yet valuable data, and synthetic data. We build a clean, open-source pipeline for curating pre-training data from diverse sources, including websites, PDFs, and videos, incorporating best practices for crawling, cleaning, flagging, and deduplication. For instruction-fine tuning, we amalgamate existing Indic datasets, translate/transliterate English datasets into Indian languages, and utilize LLaMa2 and Mixtral models to create conversations grounded in articles from Indian Wikipedia and Wikihow. Additionally, we address toxicity alignment by generating toxic prompts for multiple scenarios and then generate non-toxic responses by feeding these toxic prompts to an aligned LLaMa2 model. We hope that the datasets, tools, and resources released as a part of this work will not only propel the research and development of Indic LLMs but also establish an open-source blueprint for extending such efforts to other languages. The data and other artifacts created as part of this work are released with permissive licenses.
TACT: Advancing Complex Aggregative Reasoning with Information Extraction Tools
Large Language Models (LLMs) often do not perform well on queries that require the aggregation of information across texts. To better evaluate this setting and facilitate modeling efforts, we introduce TACT - Text And Calculations through Tables, a dataset crafted to evaluate LLMs' reasoning and computational abilities using complex instructions. TACT contains challenging instructions that demand stitching information scattered across one or more texts, and performing complex integration on this information to generate the answer. We construct this dataset by leveraging an existing dataset of texts and their associated tables. For each such tables, we formulate new queries, and gather their respective answers. We demonstrate that all contemporary LLMs perform poorly on this dataset, achieving an accuracy below 38\%. To pinpoint the difficulties and thoroughly dissect the problem, we analyze model performance across three components: table-generation, Pandas command-generation, and execution. Unexpectedly, we discover that each component presents substantial challenges for current LLMs. These insights lead us to propose a focused modeling framework, which we refer to as IE as a tool. Specifically, we propose to add "tools" for each of the above steps, and implement each such tool with few-shot prompting. This approach shows an improvement over existing prompting techniques, offering a promising direction for enhancing model capabilities in these tasks.
JurisTCU: A Brazilian Portuguese Information Retrieval Dataset with Query Relevance Judgments
This paper introduces JurisTCU, a Brazilian Portuguese dataset for legal information retrieval (LIR). The dataset is freely available and consists of 16,045 jurisprudential documents from the Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts, along with 150 queries annotated with relevance judgments. It addresses the scarcity of Portuguese-language LIR datasets with query relevance annotations. The queries are organized into three groups: real user keyword-based queries, synthetic keyword-based queries, and synthetic question-based queries. Relevance judgments were produced through a hybrid approach combining LLM-based scoring with expert domain validation. We used JurisTCU in 14 experiments using lexical search (document expansion methods) and semantic search (BERT-based and OpenAI embeddings). We show that the document expansion methods significantly improve the performance of standard BM25 search on this dataset, with improvements exceeding 45% in P@10, R@10, and nDCG@10 metrics when evaluating short keyword-based queries. Among the embedding models, the OpenAI models produced the best results, with improvements of approximately 70% in P@10, R@10, and nDCG@10 metrics for short keyword-based queries, suggesting that these dense embeddings capture semantic relationships in this domain, surpassing the reliance on lexical terms. Besides offering a dataset for the Portuguese-language IR research community, suitable for evaluating search systems, the results also contribute to enhancing a search system highly relevant to Brazilian citizens.
American Stories: A Large-Scale Structured Text Dataset of Historical U.S. Newspapers
Existing full text datasets of U.S. public domain newspapers do not recognize the often complex layouts of newspaper scans, and as a result the digitized content scrambles texts from articles, headlines, captions, advertisements, and other layout regions. OCR quality can also be low. This study develops a novel, deep learning pipeline for extracting full article texts from newspaper images and applies it to the nearly 20 million scans in Library of Congress's public domain Chronicling America collection. The pipeline includes layout detection, legibility classification, custom OCR, and association of article texts spanning multiple bounding boxes. To achieve high scalability, it is built with efficient architectures designed for mobile phones. The resulting American Stories dataset provides high quality data that could be used for pre-training a large language model to achieve better understanding of historical English and historical world knowledge. The dataset could also be added to the external database of a retrieval-augmented language model to make historical information - ranging from interpretations of political events to minutiae about the lives of people's ancestors - more widely accessible. Furthermore, structured article texts facilitate using transformer-based methods for popular social science applications like topic classification, detection of reproduced content, and news story clustering. Finally, American Stories provides a massive silver quality dataset for innovating multimodal layout analysis models and other multimodal applications.
MatKB: Semantic Search for Polycrystalline Materials Synthesis Procedures
In this paper, we present a novel approach to knowledge extraction and retrieval using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for material science. Our goal is to automatically mine structured knowledge from millions of research articles in the field of polycrystalline materials and make it easily accessible to the broader community. The proposed method leverages NLP techniques such as entity recognition and document classification to extract relevant information and build an extensive knowledge base, from a collection of 9.5 Million publications. The resulting knowledge base is integrated into a search engine, which enables users to search for information about specific materials, properties, and experiments with greater precision than traditional search engines like Google. We hope our results can enable material scientists quickly locate desired experimental procedures, compare their differences, and even inspire them to design new experiments. Our website will be available at Github https://github.com/Xianjun-Yang/PcMSP.git soon.
InstructIE: A Chinese Instruction-based Information Extraction Dataset
We introduce a new Information Extraction (IE) task dubbed Instruction-based IE, which aims to ask the system to follow specific instructions or guidelines to extract information. To facilitate research in this area, we construct a dataset called InstructIE, consisting of 270,000 weakly supervised data from Chinese Wikipedia and 1,000 high-quality crowdsourced annotated instances. We further evaluate the performance of various baseline models on the InstructIE dataset. The results reveal that although current models exhibit promising performance, there is still room for improvement. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive case study analysis, underlining the challenges inherent in the Instruction-based IE task. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zjunlp/DeepKE/tree/main/example/llm.
FaMTEB: Massive Text Embedding Benchmark in Persian Language
In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark for Persian (Farsi) text embeddings, built upon the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB). Our benchmark includes 63 datasets spanning seven different tasks: classification, clustering, pair classification, reranking, retrieval, summary retrieval, and semantic textual similarity. The datasets are formed as a combination of existing, translated, and newly generated data, offering a diverse evaluation framework for Persian language models. Given the increasing use of text embedding models in chatbots, evaluation datasets are becoming inseparable ingredients in chatbot challenges and Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems. As a contribution, we include chatbot evaluation datasets in the MTEB benchmark for the first time. In addition, in this paper, we introduce the new task of summary retrieval which is not part of the tasks included in standard MTEB. Another contribution of this paper is the introduction of a substantial number of new Persian language NLP datasets suitable for training and evaluation, some of which have no previous counterparts in Persian. We evaluate the performance of several Persian and multilingual embedding models in a range of tasks. This work introduces an open-source benchmark with datasets, code and a public leaderboard.
PIRB: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Polish Dense and Hybrid Text Retrieval Methods
We present Polish Information Retrieval Benchmark (PIRB), a comprehensive evaluation framework encompassing 41 text information retrieval tasks for Polish. The benchmark incorporates existing datasets as well as 10 new, previously unpublished datasets covering diverse topics such as medicine, law, business, physics, and linguistics. We conduct an extensive evaluation of over 20 dense and sparse retrieval models, including the baseline models trained by us as well as other available Polish and multilingual methods. Finally, we introduce a three-step process for training highly effective language-specific retrievers, consisting of knowledge distillation, supervised fine-tuning, and building sparse-dense hybrid retrievers using a lightweight rescoring model. In order to validate our approach, we train new text encoders for Polish and compare their results with previously evaluated methods. Our dense models outperform the best solutions available to date, and the use of hybrid methods further improves their performance.
Zyda: A 1.3T Dataset for Open Language Modeling
The size of large language models (LLMs) has scaled dramatically in recent years and their computational and data requirements have surged correspondingly. State-of-the-art language models, even at relatively smaller sizes, typically require training on at least a trillion tokens. This rapid advancement has eclipsed the growth of open-source datasets available for large-scale LLM pretraining. In this paper, we introduce Zyda (Zyphra Dataset), a dataset under a permissive license comprising 1.3 trillion tokens, assembled by integrating several major respected open-source datasets into a single, high-quality corpus. We apply rigorous filtering and deduplication processes, both within and across datasets, to maintain and enhance the quality derived from the original datasets. Our evaluations show that Zyda not only competes favorably with other open datasets like Dolma, FineWeb, and RefinedWeb, but also substantially improves the performance of comparable models from the Pythia suite. Our rigorous data processing methods significantly enhance Zyda's effectiveness, outperforming even the best of its constituent datasets when used independently.
IDEL: In-Database Entity Linking with Neural Embeddings
We present a novel architecture, In-Database Entity Linking (IDEL), in which we integrate the analytics-optimized RDBMS MonetDB with neural text mining abilities. Our system design abstracts core tasks of most neural entity linking systems for MonetDB. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first defacto implemented system integrating entity-linking in a database. We leverage the ability of MonetDB to support in-database-analytics with user defined functions (UDFs) implemented in Python. These functions call machine learning libraries for neural text mining, such as TensorFlow. The system achieves zero cost for data shipping and transformation by utilizing MonetDB's ability to embed Python processes in the database kernel and exchange data in NumPy arrays. IDEL represents text and relational data in a joint vector space with neural embeddings and can compensate errors with ambiguous entity representations. For detecting matching entities, we propose a novel similarity function based on joint neural embeddings which are learned via minimizing pairwise contrastive ranking loss. This function utilizes a high dimensional index structures for fast retrieval of matching entities. Our first implementation and experiments using the WebNLG corpus show the effectiveness and the potentials of IDEL.
Learning High-Quality and General-Purpose Phrase Representations
Phrase representations play an important role in data science and natural language processing, benefiting various tasks like Entity Alignment, Record Linkage, Fuzzy Joins, and Paraphrase Classification. The current state-of-the-art method involves fine-tuning pre-trained language models for phrasal embeddings using contrastive learning. However, we have identified areas for improvement. First, these pre-trained models tend to be unnecessarily complex and require to be pre-trained on a corpus with context sentences. Second, leveraging the phrase type and morphology gives phrase representations that are both more precise and more flexible. We propose an improved framework to learn phrase representations in a context-free fashion. The framework employs phrase type classification as an auxiliary task and incorporates character-level information more effectively into the phrase representation. Furthermore, we design three granularities of data augmentation to increase the diversity of training samples. Our experiments across a wide range of tasks show that our approach generates superior phrase embeddings compared to previous methods while requiring a smaller model size. The code is available at \faGithub~ https://github.com/tigerchen52/PEARL abstract
Event-driven Real-time Retrieval in Web Search
Information retrieval in real-time search presents unique challenges distinct from those encountered in classical web search. These challenges are particularly pronounced due to the rapid change of user search intent, which is influenced by the occurrence and evolution of breaking news events, such as earthquakes, elections, and wars. Previous dense retrieval methods, which primarily focused on static semantic representation, lack the capacity to capture immediate search intent, leading to inferior performance in retrieving the most recent event-related documents in time-sensitive scenarios. To address this issue, this paper expands the query with event information that represents real-time search intent. The Event information is then integrated with the query through a cross-attention mechanism, resulting in a time-context query representation. We further enhance the model's capacity for event representation through multi-task training. Since publicly available datasets such as MS-MARCO do not contain any event information on the query side and have few time-sensitive queries, we design an automatic data collection and annotation pipeline to address this issue, which includes ModelZoo-based Coarse Annotation and LLM-driven Fine Annotation processes. In addition, we share the training tricks such as two-stage training and hard negative sampling. Finally, we conduct a set of offline experiments on a million-scale production dataset to evaluate our approach and deploy an A/B testing in a real online system to verify the performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baseline methods.
Dataset and Baseline System for Multi-lingual Extraction and Normalization of Temporal and Numerical Expressions
Temporal and numerical expression understanding is of great importance in many downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. However, much previous work covers only a few sub-types and focuses only on entity extraction, which severely limits the usability of identified mentions. In order for such entities to be useful in downstream scenarios, coverage and granularity of sub-types are important; and, even more so, providing resolution into concrete values that can be manipulated. Furthermore, most previous work addresses only a handful of languages. Here we describe a multi-lingual evaluation dataset - NTX - covering diverse temporal and numerical expressions across 14 languages and covering extraction, normalization, and resolution. Along with the dataset we provide a robust rule-based system as a strong baseline for comparisons against other models to be evaluated in this dataset. Data and code are available at https://aka.ms/NTX.
Arctic-Embed 2.0: Multilingual Retrieval Without Compromise
This paper presents the training methodology of Arctic-Embed 2.0, a set of open-source text embedding models built for accurate and efficient multilingual retrieval. While prior works have suffered from degraded English retrieval quality, Arctic-Embed 2.0 delivers competitive retrieval quality on multilingual and English-only benchmarks, and supports Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) for efficient embedding storage with significantly lower compressed quality degradation compared to alternatives. We detail the design and implementation, presenting several important open research questions that arose during model development. We conduct experiments exploring these research questions and include extensive discussion aimed at fostering further discussion in this field.
Building a Family of Data Augmentation Models for Low-cost LLM Fine-tuning on the Cloud
Specializing LLMs in various domain-specific tasks has emerged as a critical step towards achieving high performance. However, the construction and annotation of datasets in specific domains are always very costly. Apart from using superior and expensive closed-source LLM APIs to construct datasets, some open-source models have become strong enough to handle dataset construction in many scenarios. Thus, we present a family of data augmentation models designed to significantly improve the efficiency for model fine-tuning. These models, trained based on sufficiently small LLMs, support key functionalities with low inference costs: instruction expansion, instruction refinement, and instruction-response pair expansion. To fulfill this goal, we first construct an automatic data collection system with seed datasets generated from both public repositories and our in-house datasets. This system leverages powerful LLMs to expand, refine and re-write the instructions and responses, incorporating quality assessment techniques. Following this, we introduce the training process of our models, which effectively distills task-solving and text synthesis abilities from teacher LLMs. Finally, we demonstrate how we integrate these functionalities into a machine learning platform to support low-cost LLM fine-tuning from both dataset preparation and training perspectives for users. Experiments and an application study prove the effectiveness of our approach.
Synthetic Data Generation with Large Language Models for Personalized Community Question Answering
Personalization in Information Retrieval (IR) is a topic studied by the research community since a long time. However, there is still a lack of datasets to conduct large-scale evaluations of personalized IR; this is mainly due to the fact that collecting and curating high-quality user-related information requires significant costs and time investment. Furthermore, the creation of datasets for Personalized IR (PIR) tasks is affected by both privacy concerns and the need for accurate user-related data, which are often not publicly available. Recently, researchers have started to explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic datasets, which is a possible solution to generate data for low-resource tasks. In this paper, we investigate the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating synthetic documents to train an IR system for a Personalized Community Question Answering task. To study the effectiveness of IR models fine-tuned on LLM-generated data, we introduce a new dataset, named Sy-SE-PQA. We build Sy-SE-PQA based on an existing dataset, SE-PQA, which consists of questions and answers posted on the popular StackExchange communities. Starting from questions in SE-PQA, we generate synthetic answers using different prompt techniques and LLMs. Our findings suggest that LLMs have high potential in generating data tailored to users' needs. The synthetic data can replace human-written training data, even if the generated data may contain incorrect information.
Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond
We introduce an architecture to learn joint multilingual sentence representations for 93 languages, belonging to more than 30 different families and written in 28 different scripts. Our system uses a single BiLSTM encoder with a shared BPE vocabulary for all languages, which is coupled with an auxiliary decoder and trained on publicly available parallel corpora. This enables us to learn a classifier on top of the resulting embeddings using English annotated data only, and transfer it to any of the 93 languages without any modification. Our experiments in cross-lingual natural language inference (XNLI dataset), cross-lingual document classification (MLDoc dataset) and parallel corpus mining (BUCC dataset) show the effectiveness of our approach. We also introduce a new test set of aligned sentences in 112 languages, and show that our sentence embeddings obtain strong results in multilingual similarity search even for low-resource languages. Our implementation, the pre-trained encoder and the multilingual test set are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LASER
iDRAMA-Scored-2024: A Dataset of the Scored Social Media Platform from 2020 to 2023
Online web communities often face bans for violating platform policies, encouraging their migration to alternative platforms. This migration, however, can result in increased toxicity and unforeseen consequences on the new platform. In recent years, researchers have collected data from many alternative platforms, indicating coordinated efforts leading to offline events, conspiracy movements, hate speech propagation, and harassment. Thus, it becomes crucial to characterize and understand these alternative platforms. To advance research in this direction, we collect and release a large-scale dataset from Scored -- an alternative Reddit platform that sheltered banned fringe communities, for example, c/TheDonald (a prominent right-wing community) and c/GreatAwakening (a conspiratorial community). Over four years, we collected approximately 57M posts from Scored, with at least 58 communities identified as migrating from Reddit and over 950 communities created since the platform's inception. Furthermore, we provide sentence embeddings of all posts in our dataset, generated through a state-of-the-art model, to further advance the field in characterizing the discussions within these communities. We aim to provide these resources to facilitate their investigations without the need for extensive data collection and processing efforts.
BIGPATENT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Abstractive and Coherent Summarization
Most existing text summarization datasets are compiled from the news domain, where summaries have a flattened discourse structure. In such datasets, summary-worthy content often appears in the beginning of input articles. Moreover, large segments from input articles are present verbatim in their respective summaries. These issues impede the learning and evaluation of systems that can understand an article's global content structure as well as produce abstractive summaries with high compression ratio. In this work, we present a novel dataset, BIGPATENT, consisting of 1.3 million records of U.S. patent documents along with human written abstractive summaries. Compared to existing summarization datasets, BIGPATENT has the following properties: i) summaries contain a richer discourse structure with more recurring entities, ii) salient content is evenly distributed in the input, and iii) lesser and shorter extractive fragments are present in the summaries. Finally, we train and evaluate baselines and popular learning models on BIGPATENT to shed light on new challenges and motivate future directions for summarization research.
Know Your RAG: Dataset Taxonomy and Generation Strategies for Evaluating RAG Systems
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are a widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the industry. While many tools exist empowering developers to build their own systems, measuring their performance locally, with datasets reflective of the system's use cases, is a technological challenge. Solutions to this problem range from non-specific and cheap (most public datasets) to specific and costly (generating data from local documents). In this paper, we show that using public question and answer (Q&A) datasets to assess retrieval performance can lead to non-optimal systems design, and that common tools for RAG dataset generation can lead to unbalanced data. We propose solutions to these issues based on the characterization of RAG datasets through labels and through label-targeted data generation. Finally, we show that fine-tuned small LLMs can efficiently generate Q&A datasets. We believe that these observations are invaluable to the know-your-data step of RAG systems development.
NERetrieve: Dataset for Next Generation Named Entity Recognition and Retrieval
Recognizing entities in texts is a central need in many information-seeking scenarios, and indeed, Named Entity Recognition (NER) is arguably one of the most successful examples of a widely adopted NLP task and corresponding NLP technology. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) appear to provide effective solutions (also) for NER tasks that were traditionally handled with dedicated models, often matching or surpassing the abilities of the dedicated models. Should NER be considered a solved problem? We argue to the contrary: the capabilities provided by LLMs are not the end of NER research, but rather an exciting beginning. They allow taking NER to the next level, tackling increasingly more useful, and increasingly more challenging, variants. We present three variants of the NER task, together with a dataset to support them. The first is a move towards more fine-grained -- and intersectional -- entity types. The second is a move towards zero-shot recognition and extraction of these fine-grained types based on entity-type labels. The third, and most challenging, is the move from the recognition setup to a novel retrieval setup, where the query is a zero-shot entity type, and the expected result is all the sentences from a large, pre-indexed corpus that contain entities of these types, and their corresponding spans. We show that all of these are far from being solved. We provide a large, silver-annotated corpus of 4 million paragraphs covering 500 entity types, to facilitate research towards all of these three goals.
NLU++: A Multi-Label, Slot-Rich, Generalisable Dataset for Natural Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialogue
We present NLU++, a novel dataset for natural language understanding (NLU) in task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems, with the aim to provide a much more challenging evaluation environment for dialogue NLU models, up to date with the current application and industry requirements. NLU++ is divided into two domains (BANKING and HOTELS) and brings several crucial improvements over current commonly used NLU datasets. 1) NLU++ provides fine-grained domain ontologies with a large set of challenging multi-intent sentences, introducing and validating the idea of intent modules that can be combined into complex intents that convey complex user goals, combined with finer-grained and thus more challenging slot sets. 2) The ontology is divided into domain-specific and generic (i.e., domain-universal) intent modules that overlap across domains, promoting cross-domain reusability of annotated examples. 3) The dataset design has been inspired by the problems observed in industrial ToD systems, and 4) it has been collected, filtered and carefully annotated by dialogue NLU experts, yielding high-quality annotated data. Finally, we benchmark a series of current state-of-the-art NLU models on NLU++; the results demonstrate the challenging nature of the dataset, especially in low-data regimes, the validity of `intent modularisation', and call for further research on ToD NLU.