Daily Papers

Due to their crucial role in all NLP, several benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate pretrained language models. In spite of these efforts, no public benchmark of diverse nature currently exists for evaluation of Arabic. This makes it challenging to measure progress for both Arabic and multilingual language models. This challenge is compounded by the fact that any benchmark targeting Arabic needs to take into account the fact that Arabic is not a single language but rather a collection of languages and varieties. In this work, we introduce ORCA, a publicly available benchmark for Arabic language understanding evaluation. ORCA is carefully constructed to cover diverse Arabic varieties and a wide range of challenging Arabic understanding tasks exploiting 60 different datasets across seven NLU task clusters. To measure current progress in Arabic NLU, we use ORCA to offer a comprehensive comparison between 18 multilingual and Arabic language models. We also provide a public leaderboard with a unified single-number evaluation metric (ORCA score) to facilitate future research.

Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has produced models that exhibit remarkable performance across a variety of NLP tasks. However, it remains unclear whether the existing focus of NLP research accurately captures the genuine requirements of human users. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the divergence between current NLP research and the needs of real-world NLP applications via a large-scale collection of user-GPT conversations. We analyze a large-scale collection of real user queries to GPT. We compare these queries against existing NLP benchmark tasks and identify a significant gap between the tasks that users frequently request from LLMs and the tasks that are commonly studied in academic research. For example, we find that tasks such as ``design'' and ``planning'' are prevalent in user interactions but are largely neglected or different from traditional NLP benchmarks. We investigate these overlooked tasks, dissect the practical challenges they pose, and provide insights toward a roadmap to make LLMs better aligned with user needs.

In this work, we aim to connect two research areas: instruction models and retrieval-based models. While instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at extracting information from text, they are not suitable for semantic retrieval. Similarity search over embedding vectors allows to index and query vectors, but the similarity reflected in the embedding is sub-optimal for many use cases. We identify the task of retrieving sentences based on abstract descriptions of their content. We demonstrate the inadequacy of current text embeddings and propose an alternative model that significantly improves when used in standard nearest neighbor search. The model is trained using positive and negative pairs sourced through prompting an a large language model (LLM). While it is easy to source the training material from an LLM, the retrieval task cannot be performed by the LLM directly. This demonstrates that data from LLMs can be used not only for distilling more efficient specialized models than the original LLM, but also for creating new capabilities not immediately possible using the original model.

We introduce ClusterLLM, a novel text clustering framework that leverages feedback from an instruction-tuned large language model, such as ChatGPT. Compared with traditional unsupervised methods that builds upon "small" embedders, ClusterLLM exhibits two intriguing advantages: (1) it enjoys the emergent capability of LLM even if its embeddings are inaccessible; and (2) it understands the user's preference on clustering through textual instruction and/or a few annotated data. First, we prompt ChatGPT for insights on clustering perspective by constructing hard triplet questions <does A better correspond to B than C>, where A, B and C are similar data points that belong to different clusters according to small embedder. We empirically show that this strategy is both effective for fine-tuning small embedder and cost-efficient to query ChatGPT. Second, we prompt ChatGPT for helps on clustering granularity by carefully designed pairwise questions <do A and B belong to the same category>, and tune the granularity from cluster hierarchies that is the most consistent with the ChatGPT answers. Extensive experiments on 14 datasets show that ClusterLLM consistently improves clustering quality, at an average cost of ~$0.6 per dataset.

In recent years, the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed the landscape of scientific research, offering unprecedented support across various stages of the research cycle. This paper presents the first systematic survey dedicated to exploring how LLMs are revolutionizing the scientific research process. We analyze the unique roles LLMs play across four critical stages of research: hypothesis discovery, experiment planning and implementation, scientific writing, and peer reviewing. Our review comprehensively showcases the task-specific methodologies and evaluation benchmarks. By identifying current challenges and proposing future research directions, this survey not only highlights the transformative potential of LLMs, but also aims to inspire and guide researchers and practitioners in leveraging LLMs to advance scientific inquiry. Resources are available at the following repository: https://github.com/du-nlp-lab/LLM4SR

Dense retrieval has become a prominent method to obtain relevant context or world knowledge in open-domain NLP tasks. When we use a learned dense retriever on a retrieval corpus at inference time, an often-overlooked design choice is the retrieval unit in which the corpus is indexed, e.g. document, passage, or sentence. We discover that the retrieval unit choice significantly impacts the performance of both retrieval and downstream tasks. Distinct from the typical approach of using passages or sentences, we introduce a novel retrieval unit, proposition, for dense retrieval. Propositions are defined as atomic expressions within text, each encapsulating a distinct factoid and presented in a concise, self-contained natural language format. We conduct an empirical comparison of different retrieval granularity. Our results reveal that proposition-based retrieval significantly outperforms traditional passage or sentence-based methods in dense retrieval. Moreover, retrieval by proposition also enhances the performance of downstream QA tasks, since the retrieved texts are more condensed with question-relevant information, reducing the need for lengthy input tokens and minimizing the inclusion of extraneous, irrelevant information.

Large language models (LLMs) are incredible and versatile tools for text-based tasks that have enabled countless, previously unimaginable, applications. Retrieval models, in contrast, have not yet seen such capable general-purpose models emerge. To achieve this goal, retrieval models must be able to perform complex retrieval tasks, where queries contain multiple parts, constraints, or requirements in natural language. These tasks represent a natural progression from the simple, single-aspect queries that are used in the vast majority of existing, commonly used evaluation sets. Complex queries naturally arise as people expect search systems to handle more specific and often ambitious information requests, as is demonstrated by how people use LLM-based information systems. Despite the growing desire for retrieval models to expand their capabilities in complex retrieval tasks, there exist limited resources to assess the ability of retrieval models on a comprehensive set of diverse complex tasks. The few resources that do exist feature a limited scope and often lack realistic settings making it hard to know the true capabilities of retrieval models on complex real-world retrieval tasks. To address this shortcoming and spur innovation in next-generation retrieval models, we construct a diverse and realistic set of complex retrieval tasks and benchmark a representative set of state-of-the-art retrieval models. Additionally, we explore the impact of LLM-based query expansion and rewriting on retrieval quality. Our results show that even the best models struggle to produce high-quality retrieval results with the highest average nDCG@10 of only 0.346 and R@100 of only 0.587 across all tasks. Although LLM augmentation can help weaker models, the strongest model has decreased performance across all metrics with all rewriting techniques.

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.

Sentence embeddings are commonly used in text clustering and semantic retrieval tasks. State-of-the-art sentence representation methods are based on artificial neural networks fine-tuned on large collections of manually labeled sentence pairs. Sufficient amount of annotated data is available for high-resource languages such as English or Chinese. In less popular languages, multilingual models have to be used, which offer lower performance. In this publication, we address this problem by proposing a method for training effective language-specific sentence encoders without manually labeled data. Our approach is to automatically construct a dataset of paraphrase pairs from sentence-aligned bilingual text corpora. We then use the collected data to fine-tune a Transformer language model with an additional recurrent pooling layer. Our sentence encoder can be trained in less than a day on a single graphics card, achieving high performance on a diverse set of sentence-level tasks. We evaluate our method on eight linguistic tasks in Polish, comparing it with the best available multilingual sentence encoders.

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.

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.

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.

We present TopClustRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system developed for the LiveRAG Challenge, which evaluates end-to-end question answering over large-scale web corpora. Our system employs a hybrid retrieval strategy combining sparse and dense indices, followed by K-Means clustering to group semantically similar passages. Representative passages from each cluster are used to construct cluster-specific prompts for a large language model (LLM), generating intermediate answers that are filtered, reranked, and finally synthesized into a single, comprehensive response. This multi-stage pipeline enhances answer diversity, relevance, and faithfulness to retrieved evidence. Evaluated on the FineWeb Sample-10BT dataset, TopClustRAG ranked 2nd in faithfulness and 7th in correctness on the official leaderboard, demonstrating the effectiveness of clustering-based context filtering and prompt aggregation in large-scale RAG systems.

In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform various natural language processing tasks with suitable instruction prompts. However, designing effective prompts manually is challenging and time-consuming. Existing methods for automatic prompt optimization either lack flexibility or efficiency. In this paper, we propose an effective approach to automatically select the optimal prompt for a given input from a finite set of synthetic candidate prompts. Our approach consists of three steps: (1) clustering the training data and generating candidate prompts for each cluster using an LLM-based prompt generator; (2) synthesizing a dataset of input-prompt-output tuples for training a prompt evaluator to rank the prompts based on their relevance to the input; (3) using the prompt evaluator to select the best prompt for a new input at test time. Our approach balances prompt generality-specificity and eliminates the need for resource-intensive training and inference. It demonstrates competitive performance on zero-shot question-answering datasets: GSM8K, MultiArith, and AQuA.

Although large language models (LLMs) are impressive in solving various tasks, they can quickly be outdated after deployment. Maintaining their up-to-date status is a pressing concern in the current era. This paper provides a comprehensive review of recent advances in aligning LLMs with the ever-changing world knowledge without re-training from scratch. We categorize research works systemically and provide in-depth comparisons and discussion. We also discuss existing challenges and highlight future directions to facilitate research in this field. We release the paper list at https://github.com/hyintell/awesome-refreshing-llms

This paper presents a comprehensive and practical guide for practitioners and end-users working with Large Language Models (LLMs) in their downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. We provide discussions and insights into the usage of LLMs from the perspectives of models, data, and downstream tasks. Firstly, we offer an introduction and brief summary of current GPT- and BERT-style LLMs. Then, we discuss the influence of pre-training data, training data, and test data. Most importantly, we provide a detailed discussion about the use and non-use cases of large language models for various natural language processing tasks, such as knowledge-intensive tasks, traditional natural language understanding tasks, natural language generation tasks, emergent abilities, and considerations for specific tasks.We present various use cases and non-use cases to illustrate the practical applications and limitations of LLMs in real-world scenarios. We also try to understand the importance of data and the specific challenges associated with each NLP task. Furthermore, we explore the impact of spurious biases on LLMs and delve into other essential considerations, such as efficiency, cost, and latency, to ensure a comprehensive understanding of deploying LLMs in practice. This comprehensive guide aims to provide researchers and practitioners with valuable insights and best practices for working with LLMs, thereby enabling the successful implementation of these models in a wide range of NLP tasks. A curated list of practical guide resources of LLMs, regularly updated, can be found at https://github.com/Mooler0410/LLMsPracticalGuide.

The exponential growth of scientific literature necessitates advanced tools for effective knowledge exploration. We present Knowledge Navigator, a system designed to enhance exploratory search abilities by organizing and structuring the retrieved documents from broad topical queries into a navigable, two-level hierarchy of named and descriptive scientific topics and subtopics. This structured organization provides an overall view of the research themes in a domain, while also enabling iterative search and deeper knowledge discovery within specific subtopics by allowing users to refine their focus and retrieve additional relevant documents. Knowledge Navigator combines LLM capabilities with cluster-based methods to enable an effective browsing method. We demonstrate our approach's effectiveness through automatic and manual evaluations on two novel benchmarks, CLUSTREC-COVID and SCITOC. Our code, prompts, and benchmarks are made publicly available.

Large language models (LLMs) have grown in their usage to provide support for question answering across numerous disciplines. The models on their own have already shown promise for answering basic questions, however fail quickly where expert domain knowledge is required or the question is nuanced. Scientific research often involves searching for relevant literature, distilling pertinent information from that literature and analysing how the findings support or contradict one another. The information is often encapsulated in the full text body of research articles, rather than just in the abstracts. Statements within these articles frequently require the wider article context to be fully understood. We have built an LLM-based system that performs such search and distillation of information encapsulated in scientific literature, and we evaluate our keyword based search and information distillation system against a set of biology related questions from previously released literature benchmarks. We demonstrate sparse retrieval methods exhibit results close to state of the art without the need for dense retrieval, with its associated infrastructure and complexity overhead. We also show how to increase the coverage of relevant documents for literature review generation.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating multiple responses to a single prompt, yet little effort has been expended to help end-users or system designers make use of this capability. In this paper, we explore how to present many LLM responses at once. We design five features, which include both pre-existing and novel methods for computing similarities and differences across textual documents, as well as how to render their outputs. We report on a controlled user study (n=24) and eight case studies evaluating these features and how they support users in different tasks. We find that the features support a wide variety of sensemaking tasks and even make tasks previously considered to be too difficult by our participants now tractable. Finally, we present design guidelines to inform future explorations of new LLM interfaces.

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.

Unsupervised clustering is widely used to explore large corpora, but existing formulations neither consider the users' goals nor explain clusters' meanings. We propose a new task formulation, "Goal-Driven Clustering with Explanations" (GoalEx), which represents both the goal and the explanations as free-form language descriptions. For example, to categorize the errors made by a summarization system, the input to GoalEx is a corpus of annotator-written comments for system-generated summaries and a goal description "cluster the comments based on why the annotators think the summary is imperfect.''; the outputs are text clusters each with an explanation ("this cluster mentions that the summary misses important context information."), which relates to the goal and precisely explain which comments should (not) belong to a cluster. To tackle GoalEx, we prompt a language model with "[corpus subset] + [goal] + Brainstorm a list of explanations each representing a cluster."; then we classify whether each sample belongs to a cluster based on its explanation; finally, we use integer linear programming to select a subset of candidate clusters to cover most samples while minimizing overlaps. Under both automatic and human evaluation on corpora with or without labels, our method produces more accurate and goal-related explanations than prior methods. We release our data and implementation at https://github.com/ZihanWangKi/GoalEx.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various natural language processing tasks. Despite this, their application to information retrieval (IR) tasks is still challenging due to the infrequent occurrence of many IR-specific concepts in natural language. While prompt-based methods can provide task descriptions to LLMs, they often fall short in facilitating comprehensive understanding and execution of IR tasks, thereby limiting LLMs' applicability. To address this gap, in this work, we explore the potential of instruction tuning to enhance LLMs' proficiency in IR tasks. We introduce a novel instruction tuning dataset, INTERS, encompassing 21 tasks across three fundamental IR categories: query understanding, document understanding, and query-document relationship understanding. The data are derived from 43 distinct datasets with manually written templates. Our empirical results reveal that INTERS significantly boosts the performance of various publicly available LLMs, such as LLaMA, Mistral, and Phi, in search-related tasks. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis to ascertain the effects of base model selection, instruction design, volume of instructions, and task variety on performance. We make our dataset and the models fine-tuned on it publicly accessible at https://github.com/DaoD/INTERS.

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a widely-used tool for information seeking, but their generated outputs are prone to hallucination. In this work, we aim to enable LLMs to generate text with citations, improving their factual correctness and verifiability. Existing work mainly relies on commercial search engines and human evaluation, making it challenging to reproduce and compare with different modeling approaches. We propose ALCE, the first benchmark for Automatic LLMs' Citation Evaluation. ALCE collects a diverse set of questions and retrieval corpora and requires building end-to-end systems to retrieve supporting evidence and generate answers with citations. We build automatic metrics along three dimensions -- fluency, correctness, and citation quality -- and demonstrate their strong correlation with human judgements. Our experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs and novel prompting strategies show that current systems have considerable room for improvements -- for example, on the ELI5 dataset, even the best model has 49% of its generations lacking complete citation support. Our extensive analyses further highlight promising future directions, including developing better retrievers, advancing long-context LLMs, and improving the ability to synthesize information from multiple sources.

Information retrieval involves selecting artifacts from a corpus that are most relevant to a given search query. The flavor of retrieval typically used in classical applications can be termed as homogeneous and relaxed, where queries and corpus elements are both natural language (NL) utterances (homogeneous) and the goal is to pick most relevant elements from the corpus in the Top-K, where K is large, such as 10, 25, 50 or even 100 (relaxed). Recently, retrieval is being used extensively in preparing prompts for large language models (LLMs) to enable LLMs to perform targeted tasks. These new applications of retrieval are often heterogeneous and strict -- the queries and the corpus contain different kinds of entities, such as NL and code, and there is a need for improving retrieval at Top-K for small values of K, such as K=1 or 3 or 5. Current dense retrieval techniques based on pretrained embeddings provide a general-purpose and powerful approach for retrieval, but they are oblivious to task-specific notions of similarity of heterogeneous artifacts. We introduce Adapted Dense Retrieval, a mechanism to transform embeddings to enable improved task-specific, heterogeneous and strict retrieval. Adapted Dense Retrieval works by learning a low-rank residual adaptation of the pretrained black-box embedding. We empirically validate our approach by showing improvements over the state-of-the-art general-purpose embeddings-based baseline.

Knowledge-intensive language tasks (KILTs) benefit from retrieving high-quality relevant contexts from large external knowledge corpora. Learning task-specific retrievers that return relevant contexts at an appropriate level of semantic granularity, such as a document retriever, passage retriever, sentence retriever, and entity retriever, may help to achieve better performance on the end-to-end task. But a task-specific retriever usually has poor generalization ability to new domains and tasks, and it may be costly to deploy a variety of specialised retrievers in practice. We propose a unified generative retriever (UGR) that combines task-specific effectiveness with robust performance over different retrieval tasks in KILTs. To achieve this goal, we make two major contributions: (i) To unify different retrieval tasks into a single generative form, we introduce an n-gram-based identifier for relevant contexts at different levels of granularity in KILTs. And (ii) to address different retrieval tasks with a single model, we employ a prompt learning strategy and investigate three methods to design prompt tokens for each task. In this way, the proposed UGR model can not only share common knowledge across tasks for better generalization, but also perform different retrieval tasks effectively by distinguishing task-specific characteristics. We train UGR on a heterogeneous set of retrieval corpora with well-designed prompts in a supervised and multi-task fashion. Experimental results on the KILT benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of UGR on in-domain datasets, out-of-domain datasets, and unseen tasks.

This paper introduces InstUPR, an unsupervised passage reranking method based on large language models (LLMs). Different from existing approaches that rely on extensive training with query-document pairs or retrieval-specific instructions, our method leverages the instruction-following capabilities of instruction-tuned LLMs for passage reranking without any additional fine-tuning. To achieve this, we introduce a soft score aggregation technique and employ pairwise reranking for unsupervised passage reranking. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark demonstrate that InstUPR outperforms unsupervised baselines as well as an instruction-tuned reranker, highlighting its effectiveness and superiority. Source code to reproduce all experiments is open-sourced at https://github.com/MiuLab/InstUPR

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.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in constructing passage retrieval datasets. However, existing methods still face limitations in expressing cross-doc query needs and controlling annotation quality. To address these issues, this paper proposes a bidirectional generation pipeline, which aims to generate 3-level hierarchical queries for both intra-doc and cross-doc scenarios and mine additional relevance labels on top of direct mapping annotation. The pipeline introduces two query generation methods: bottom-up from single-doc text and top-down from multi-doc titles. The bottom-up method uses LLMs to disassemble and generate structured queries at both sentence-level and passage-level simultaneously from intra-doc passages. The top-down approach incorporates three key financial elements--industry, topic, and time--to divide report titles into clusters and prompts LLMs to generate topic-level queries from each cluster. For relevance annotation, our pipeline not only relies on direct mapping annotation from the generation relationship but also implements an indirect positives mining method to enrich the relevant query-passage pairs. Using this pipeline, we constructed a Financial Passage Retrieval Generated dataset (FinCPRG) from almost 1.3k Chinese financial research reports, which includes hierarchical queries and rich relevance labels. Through evaluations of mined relevance labels, benchmarking and training experiments, we assessed the quality of FinCPRG and validated its effectiveness as a passage retrieval dataset for both training and benchmarking.

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.

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.

The growing number of parameter-efficient adaptations of a base large language model (LLM) calls for studying whether we can reuse such trained adapters to improve performance for new tasks. We study how to best build a library of adapters given multi-task data and devise techniques for both zero-shot and supervised task generalization through routing in such library. We benchmark existing approaches to build this library and introduce model-based clustering, MBC, a method that groups tasks based on the similarity of their adapter parameters, indirectly optimizing for transfer across the multi-task dataset. To re-use the library, we present a novel zero-shot routing mechanism, Arrow, which enables dynamic selection of the most relevant adapters for new inputs without the need for retraining. We experiment with several LLMs, such as Phi-2 and Mistral, on a wide array of held-out tasks, verifying that MBC-based adapters and Arrow routing lead to superior generalization to new tasks. We make steps towards creating modular, adaptable LLMs that can match or outperform traditional joint training.

This paper introduces 26 guiding principles designed to streamline the process of querying and prompting large language models. Our goal is to simplify the underlying concepts of formulating questions for various scales of large language models, examining their abilities, and enhancing user comprehension on the behaviors of different scales of large language models when feeding into different prompts. Extensive experiments are conducted on LLaMA-1/2 (7B, 13B and 70B), GPT-3.5/4 to verify the effectiveness of the proposed principles on instructions and prompts design. We hope that this work can provide a better guide for researchers working on the prompting of large language models. Project page is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/ATLAS.

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.

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has substantially expanded the range of tasks they can address. In the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), researchers have shifted their focus from conventional NLP tasks (e.g., sequence tagging and parsing) towards tasks that revolve around aligning with human needs (e.g., brainstorming and email writing). This shift in task distribution imposes new requirements on evaluating these aligned models regarding generality (i.e., assessing performance across diverse scenarios), flexibility (i.e., examining under different protocols), and interpretability (i.e., scrutinizing models with explanations). In this paper, we propose a generative judge with 13B parameters, Auto-J, designed to address these challenges. Our model is trained on user queries and LLM-generated responses under massive real-world scenarios and accommodates diverse evaluation protocols (e.g., pairwise response comparison and single-response evaluation) with well-structured natural language critiques. To demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, we construct a new testbed covering 58 different scenarios. Experimentally, Auto-J outperforms a series of strong competitors, including both open-source and closed-source models, by a large margin. We also provide detailed analysis and case studies to further reveal the potential of our method and make a variety of resources public at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/auto-j.

This paper presents our system description and error analysis of our entry for NLLP 2024 shared task on Legal Natural Language Inference (L-NLI) hagag2024legallenssharedtask2024. The task required classifying these relationships as entailed, contradicted, or neutral, indicating any association between the review and the complaint. Our system emerged as the winning submission, significantly outperforming other entries with a substantial margin and demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in legal text analysis. We provide a detailed analysis of the strengths and limitations of each model and approach tested, along with a thorough error analysis and suggestions for future improvements. This paper aims to contribute to the growing field of legal NLP by offering insights into advanced techniques for natural language inference in legal contexts, making it accessible to both experts and newcomers in the field.

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 .

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

The advent of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks for English, such as GLUE and SuperGLUE allows new NLU models to be evaluated across a diverse set of tasks. These comprehensive benchmarks have facilitated a broad range of research and applications in natural language processing (NLP). The problem, however, is that most such benchmarks are limited to English, which has made it difficult to replicate many of the successes in English NLU for other languages. To help remedy this issue, we introduce the first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark. CLUE is an open-ended, community-driven project that brings together 9 tasks spanning several well-established single-sentence/sentence-pair classification tasks, as well as machine reading comprehension, all on original Chinese text. To establish results on these tasks, we report scores using an exhaustive set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models (9 in total). We also introduce a number of supplementary datasets and additional tools to help facilitate further progress on Chinese NLU. Our benchmark is released at https://www.CLUEbenchmarks.com

The principal goal of the TREC Neural Cross-Language Information Retrieval (NeuCLIR) track is to study the impact of neural approaches to cross-language information retrieval. The track has created four collections, large collections of Chinese, Persian, and Russian newswire and a smaller collection of Chinese scientific abstracts. The principal tasks are ranked retrieval of news in one of the three languages, using English topics. Results for a multilingual task, also with English topics but with documents from all three newswire collections, are also reported. New in this second year of the track is a pilot technical documents CLIR task for ranked retrieval of Chinese technical documents using English topics. A total of 220 runs across all tasks were submitted by six participating teams and, as baselines, by track coordinators. Task descriptions and results are presented.

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.

This paper presents the methods used for LegalLens-2024 shared task, which focused on detecting legal violations within unstructured textual data and associating these violations with potentially affected individuals. The shared task included two subtasks: A) Legal Named Entity Recognition (L-NER) and B) Legal Natural Language Inference (L-NLI). For subtask A, we utilized the spaCy library, while for subtask B, we employed a combined model incorporating RoBERTa and CNN. Our results were 86.3% in the L-NER subtask and 88.25% in the L-NLI subtask. Overall, our paper demonstrates the effectiveness of transformer models in addressing complex tasks in the legal domain. The source code for our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/NimaMeghdadi/uOttawa-at-LegalLens-2024-Transformer-based-Classification

This paper contains what the Georgetown InfoSense group has done in regard to solving the challenges presented by TREC iKAT 2023. Our submitted runs outperform the median runs by a significant margin, exhibiting superior performance in nDCG across various cut numbers and in overall success rate. Our approach uses a Generate-Retrieve-Generate method, which we've found to greatly outpace Retrieve-Then-Generate approaches for the purposes of iKAT. Our solution involves the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for initial answers, answer grounding by BM25, passage quality filtering by logistic regression, and answer generation by LLMs again. We leverage several purpose-built Language Models, including BERT, Chat-based, and text-to-transfer-based models, for text understanding, classification, generation, and summarization. The official results of the TREC evaluation contradict our initial self-evaluation, which may suggest that a decrease in the reliance on our retrieval and classification methods is better. Nonetheless, our findings suggest that the sequence of involving these different components matters, where we see an essentiality of using LLMs before using search engines.

While coreference resolution typically involves various linguistic challenges, recent models are based on a single pairwise scorer for all types of pairs. We present LingMess, a new coreference model that defines different categories of coreference cases and optimize multiple pairwise scorers, where each scorer learns a specific set of linguistic challenges. Our model substantially improves pairwise scores for most categories and outperforms cluster-level performance on Ontonotes and 5 additional datasets. Our model is available in https://github.com/shon-otmazgin/lingmess-coref

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.

Knowledge-intensive language tasks require NLP systems to both provide the correct answer and retrieve supporting evidence for it in a given corpus. Autoregressive language models are emerging as the de-facto standard for generating answers, with newer and more powerful systems emerging at an astonishing pace. In this paper we argue that all this (and future) progress can be directly applied to the retrieval problem with minimal intervention to the models' architecture. Previous work has explored ways to partition the search space into hierarchical structures and retrieve documents by autoregressively generating their unique identifier. In this work we propose an alternative that doesn't force any structure in the search space: using all ngrams in a passage as its possible identifiers. This setup allows us to use an autoregressive model to generate and score distinctive ngrams, that are then mapped to full passages through an efficient data structure. Empirically, we show this not only outperforms prior autoregressive approaches but also leads to an average improvement of at least 10 points over more established retrieval solutions for passage-level retrieval on the KILT benchmark, establishing new state-of-the-art downstream performance on some datasets, while using a considerably lighter memory footprint than competing systems. Code and pre-trained models at https://github.com/facebookresearch/SEAL.

Bangla -- ranked as the 6th most widely spoken language across the world (https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/ethnologue200), with 230 million native speakers -- is still considered as a low-resource language in the natural language processing (NLP) community. With three decades of research, Bangla NLP (BNLP) is still lagging behind mainly due to the scarcity of resources and the challenges that come with it. There is sparse work in different areas of BNLP; however, a thorough survey reporting previous work and recent advances is yet to be done. In this study, we first provide a review of Bangla NLP tasks, resources, and tools available to the research community; we benchmark datasets collected from various platforms for nine NLP tasks using current state-of-the-art algorithms (i.e., transformer-based models). We provide comparative results for the studied NLP tasks by comparing monolingual vs. multilingual models of varying sizes. We report our results using both individual and consolidated datasets and provide data splits for future research. We reviewed a total of 108 papers and conducted 175 sets of experiments. Our results show promising performance using transformer-based models while highlighting the trade-off with computational costs. We hope that such a comprehensive survey will motivate the community to build on and further advance the research on Bangla NLP.

Recent neural retrieval mainly focuses on ranking short texts and is challenged with long documents. Existing work mainly evaluates either ranking passages or whole documents. However, there are many cases where the users want to find a relevant passage within a long document from a huge corpus, e.g. legal cases, research papers, etc. In this scenario, the passage often provides little document context and thus challenges the current approaches to finding the correct document and returning accurate results. To fill this gap, we propose and name this task Document-Aware Passage Retrieval (DAPR) and build a benchmark including multiple datasets from various domains, covering both DAPR and whole-document retrieval. In experiments, we extend the state-of-the-art neural passage retrievers with document-level context via different approaches including prepending document summary, pooling over passage representations, and hybrid retrieval with BM25. The hybrid-retrieval systems, the overall best, can only improve on the DAPR tasks marginally while significantly improving on the document-retrieval tasks. This motivates further research in developing better retrieval systems for the new task. The code and the data are available at https://github.com/kwang2049/dapr

As queries in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines powered by large language models (LLMs) become increasingly complex and diverse, dense retrieval models have demonstrated strong performance in semantic matching. Nevertheless, they often struggle with fine-grained retrieval tasks, where precise keyword alignment and span-level localization are required, even in cases with high lexical overlap that would intuitively suggest easier retrieval. To systematically evaluate this limitation, we introduce two targeted tasks, keyword retrieval and part-of-passage retrieval, designed to simulate practical fine-grained scenarios. Motivated by these observations, we propose LexSemBridge, a unified framework that enhances dense query representations through fine-grained, input-aware vector modulation. LexSemBridge constructs latent enhancement vectors from input tokens using three paradigms: Statistical (SLR), Learned (LLR), and Contextual (CLR), and integrates them with dense embeddings via element-wise interaction. Theoretically, we show that this modulation preserves the semantic direction while selectively amplifying discriminative dimensions. LexSemBridge operates as a plug-in without modifying the backbone encoder and naturally extends to both text and vision modalities. Extensive experiments across semantic and fine-grained retrieval tasks validate the effectiveness and generality of our approach. All code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Jasaxion/LexSemBridge/

Despite their remarkable natural language understanding capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been underutilized for retrieval tasks. We present Search-R3, a novel framework that addresses this limitation by adapting LLMs to generate search embeddings as a direct output of their reasoning process. Our approach exploits LLMs' chain-of-thought capabilities, allowing them to produce more effective embeddings by reasoning step-by-step through complex semantic analyses. We implement this through three complementary mechanisms. (1) a supervised learning stage enables the model's ability to produce quality embeddings, (2) a reinforcement learning (RL) methodology that optimizes embedding generation alongside reasoning, and (3) a specialized RL environment that efficiently handles evolving embedding representations without requiring complete corpus re-encoding at each training iteration. Our extensive evaluations on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Search-R3 significantly outperforms prior methods by unifying the reasoning and embedding generation processes. This integrated post-training approach represents a substantial advancement in handling complex knowledge-intensive tasks that require both sophisticated reasoning and effective information retrieval. Project page: https://github.com/ytgui/Search-R3

Text generation has become more accessible than ever, and the increasing interest in these systems, especially those using large language models, has spurred an increasing number of related publications. We provide a systematic literature review comprising 244 selected papers between 2017 and 2024. This review categorizes works in text generation into five main tasks: open-ended text generation, summarization, translation, paraphrasing, and question answering. For each task, we review their relevant characteristics, sub-tasks, and specific challenges (e.g., missing datasets for multi-document summarization, coherence in story generation, and complex reasoning for question answering). Additionally, we assess current approaches for evaluating text generation systems and ascertain problems with current metrics. Our investigation shows nine prominent challenges common to all tasks and sub-tasks in recent text generation publications: bias, reasoning, hallucinations, misuse, privacy, interpretability, transparency, datasets, and computing. We provide a detailed analysis of these challenges, their potential solutions, and which gaps still require further engagement from the community. This systematic literature review targets two main audiences: early career researchers in natural language processing looking for an overview of the field and promising research directions, as well as experienced researchers seeking a detailed view of tasks, evaluation methodologies, open challenges, and recent mitigation strategies.

High-quality, large-scale instructions are crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs), however, there is a severe shortage of instruction in the field of natural language understanding (NLU). Previous works on constructing NLU instructions mainly focus on information extraction (IE), neglecting tasks such as machine reading comprehension, question answering, and text classification. Furthermore, the lack of diversity in the data has led to a decreased generalization ability of trained LLMs in other NLU tasks and a noticeable decline in the fundamental model's general capabilities. To address this issue, we propose Hum, a large-scale, high-quality synthetic instruction corpus for NLU tasks, designed to enhance the NLU capabilities of LLMs. Specifically, Hum includes IE (either close IE or open IE), machine reading comprehension, text classification, and instruction generalist tasks, thereby enriching task diversity. Additionally, we introduce a human-LLMs collaborative mechanism to synthesize instructions, which enriches instruction diversity by incorporating guidelines, preference rules, and format variants. We conduct extensive experiments on 5 NLU tasks and 28 general capability evaluation datasets for LLMs. Experimental results show that Hum enhances the NLU capabilities of six LLMs by an average of 3.1\%, with no significant decline observed in other general capabilities.

We have recently seen the emergence of several publicly available Natural Language Understanding (NLU) toolkits, which map user utterances to structured, but more abstract, Dialogue Act (DA) or Intent specifications, while making this process accessible to the lay developer. In this paper, we present the first wide coverage evaluation and comparison of some of the most popular NLU services, on a large, multi-domain (21 domains) dataset of 25K user utterances that we have collected and annotated with Intent and Entity Type specifications and which will be released as part of this submission. The results show that on Intent classification Watson significantly outperforms the other platforms, namely, Dialogflow, LUIS and Rasa; though these also perform well. Interestingly, on Entity Type recognition, Watson performs significantly worse due to its low Precision. Again, Dialogflow, LUIS and Rasa perform well on this task.

For natural language understanding (NLU) technology to be maximally useful, both practically and as a scientific object of study, it must be general: it must be able to process language in a way that is not exclusively tailored to any one specific task or dataset. In pursuit of this objective, we introduce the General Language Understanding Evaluation benchmark (GLUE), a tool for evaluating and analyzing the performance of models across a diverse range of existing NLU tasks. GLUE is model-agnostic, but it incentivizes sharing knowledge across tasks because certain tasks have very limited training data. We further provide a hand-crafted diagnostic test suite that enables detailed linguistic analysis of NLU models. We evaluate baselines based on current methods for multi-task and transfer learning and find that they do not immediately give substantial improvements over the aggregate performance of training a separate model per task, indicating room for improvement in developing general and robust NLU systems.

Recent strides in Large Language Models (LLMs) have saturated many NLP benchmarks (even professional domain-specific ones), emphasizing the need for novel, more challenging novel ones to properly assess LLM capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a novel NLP benchmark that poses challenges to current LLMs across four key dimensions: processing long documents (up to 50K tokens), utilizing domain specific knowledge (embodied in legal texts), multilingual understanding (covering five languages), and multitasking (comprising legal document to document Information Retrieval, Court View Generation, Leading Decision Summarization, Citation Extraction, and eight challenging Text Classification tasks). Our benchmark comprises diverse legal NLP datasets from the Swiss legal system, allowing for a comprehensive study of the underlying Non-English, inherently multilingual, federal legal system. Despite recent advances, efficiently processing long documents for intense review/analysis tasks remains an open challenge for language models. Also, comprehensive, domain-specific benchmarks requiring high expertise to develop are rare, as are multilingual benchmarks. This scarcity underscores our contribution's value, considering most public models are trained predominantly on English corpora, while other languages remain understudied, particularly for practical domain-specific NLP tasks. Our benchmark allows for testing and advancing the state-of-the-art LLMs. As part of our study, we evaluate several pre-trained multilingual language models on our benchmark to establish strong baselines as a point of reference. Despite the large size of our datasets (tens to hundreds of thousands of examples), existing publicly available models struggle with most tasks, even after in-domain pretraining. We publish all resources (benchmark suite, pre-trained models, code) under a fully permissive open CC BY-SA license.

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

Following each patient visit, physicians draft long semi-structured clinical summaries called SOAP notes. While invaluable to clinicians and researchers, creating digital SOAP notes is burdensome, contributing to physician burnout. In this paper, we introduce the first complete pipelines to leverage deep summarization models to generate these notes based on transcripts of conversations between physicians and patients. After exploring a spectrum of methods across the extractive-abstractive spectrum, we propose Cluster2Sent, an algorithm that (i) extracts important utterances relevant to each summary section; (ii) clusters together related utterances; and then (iii) generates one summary sentence per cluster. Cluster2Sent outperforms its purely abstractive counterpart by 8 ROUGE-1 points, and produces significantly more factual and coherent sentences as assessed by expert human evaluators. For reproducibility, we demonstrate similar benefits on the publicly available AMI dataset. Our results speak to the benefits of structuring summaries into sections and annotating supporting evidence when constructing summarization corpora.

With the release of ever more capable large language models (LLMs), researchers in NLP and related disciplines have started to explore the usability of LLMs for a wide variety of different annotation tasks. Very recently, a lot of this attention has shifted to tasks that are subjective in nature. Given that the latest generations of LLMs have digested and encoded extensive knowledge about different human subpopulations and individuals, the hope is that these models can be trained, tuned or prompted to align with a wide range of different human perspectives. While researchers already evaluate the success of this alignment via surveys and tests, there is a lack of resources to evaluate the alignment on what oftentimes matters the most in NLP; the actual downstream tasks. To fill this gap we present SubData, a Python library that offers researchers working on topics related to subjectivity in annotation tasks a convenient way of collecting, combining and using a range of suitable datasets.

In populous countries, pending legal cases have been growing exponentially. There is a need for developing NLP-based techniques for processing and automatically understanding legal documents. To promote research in the area of Legal NLP we organized the shared task LegalEval - Understanding Legal Texts at SemEval 2023. LegalEval task has three sub-tasks: Task-A (Rhetorical Roles Labeling) is about automatically structuring legal documents into semantically coherent units, Task-B (Legal Named Entity Recognition) deals with identifying relevant entities in a legal document and Task-C (Court Judgement Prediction with Explanation) explores the possibility of automatically predicting the outcome of a legal case along with providing an explanation for the prediction. In total 26 teams (approx. 100 participants spread across the world) submitted systems paper. In each of the sub-tasks, the proposed systems outperformed the baselines; however, there is a lot of scope for improvement. This paper describes the tasks, and analyzes techniques proposed by various teams.

We present ACL OCL, a scholarly corpus derived from the ACL Anthology to assist Open scientific research in the Computational Linguistics domain. Integrating and enhancing the previous versions of the ACL Anthology, the ACL OCL contributes metadata, PDF files, citation graphs and additional structured full texts with sections, figures, and links to a large knowledge resource (Semantic Scholar). The ACL OCL spans seven decades, containing 73K papers, alongside 210K figures. We spotlight how ACL OCL applies to observe trends in computational linguistics. By detecting paper topics with a supervised neural model, we note that interest in "Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing" is waning and "Natural Language Generation" is resurging. Our dataset is available from HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/WINGNUS/ACL-OCL).

Scientific literature searches are often exploratory, whereby users are not yet familiar with a particular field or concept but are interested in learning more about it. However, existing systems for scientific literature search are typically tailored to keyword-based lookup searches, limiting the possibilities for exploration. We propose NLP-KG, a feature-rich system designed to support the exploration of research literature in unfamiliar natural language processing (NLP) fields. In addition to a semantic search, NLP-KG allows users to easily find survey papers that provide a quick introduction to a field of interest. Further, a Fields of Study hierarchy graph enables users to familiarize themselves with a field and its related areas. Finally, a chat interface allows users to ask questions about unfamiliar concepts or specific articles in NLP and obtain answers grounded in knowledge retrieved from scientific publications. Our system provides users with comprehensive exploration possibilities, supporting them in investigating the relationships between different fields, understanding unfamiliar concepts in NLP, and finding relevant research literature. Demo, video, and code are available at: https://github.com/NLP-Knowledge-Graph/NLP-KG-WebApp.

We study the problem of retrieval with instructions, where users of a retrieval system explicitly describe their intent along with their queries. We aim to develop a general-purpose task-aware retrieval system using multi-task instruction tuning, which can follow human-written instructions to find the best documents for a given query. We introduce the first large-scale collection of approximately 40 retrieval datasets with instructions, BERRI, and present TART, a multi-task retrieval system trained on BERRI with instructions. TART shows strong capabilities to adapt to a new retrieval task via instructions and advances the state of the art on two zero-shot retrieval benchmarks, BEIR and LOTTE, outperforming models up to three times larger. We further introduce a new evaluation setup, X^2-Retrieval to better reflect real-world scenarios, where diverse domains and tasks are pooled and a system needs to find documents aligning users' intents. In this setup, TART significantly outperforms competitive baselines, further demonstrating the effectiveness of guiding retrieval with instructions.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive ability for open-domain NLP tasks. However, LLMs are sometimes too footloose for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks which always have restricted output and input format. Their performances on NLU tasks are highly related to prompts or demonstrations and are shown to be poor at performing several representative NLU tasks, such as event extraction and entity typing. To this end, we present SeqGPT, a bilingual (i.e., English and Chinese) open-source autoregressive model specially enhanced for open-domain natural language understanding. We express all NLU tasks with two atomic tasks, which define fixed instructions to restrict the input and output format but still ``open'' for arbitrarily varied label sets. The model is first instruction-tuned with extremely fine-grained labeled data synthesized by ChatGPT and then further fine-tuned by 233 different atomic tasks from 152 datasets across various domains. The experimental results show that SeqGPT has decent classification and extraction ability, and is capable of performing language understanding tasks on unseen domains. We also conduct empirical studies on the scaling of data and model size as well as on the transfer across tasks. Our model is accessible at https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/SeqGPT.

Despite much progress in recent years, the vast majority of work in natural language processing (NLP) is on standard languages with many speakers. In this work, we instead focus on low-resource languages and in particular non-standardized low-resource languages. Even within branches of major language families, often considered well-researched, little is known about the extent and type of available resources and what the major NLP challenges are for these language varieties. The first step to address this situation is a systematic survey of available corpora (most importantly, annotated corpora, which are particularly valuable for NLP research). Focusing on Germanic low-resource language varieties, we provide such a survey in this paper. Except for geolocation (origin of speaker or document), we find that manually annotated linguistic resources are sparse and, if they exist, mostly cover morphosyntax. Despite this lack of resources, we observe that interest in this area is increasing: there is active development and a growing research community. To facilitate research, we make our overview of over 80 corpora publicly available. We share a companion website of this overview at https://github.com/mainlp/germanic-lrl-corpora .

SemEval-2024 Task 8 introduces the challenge of identifying machine-generated texts from diverse Large Language Models (LLMs) in various languages and domains. The task comprises three subtasks: binary classification in monolingual and multilingual (Subtask A), multi-class classification (Subtask B), and mixed text detection (Subtask C). This paper focuses on Subtask A & B. Each subtask is supported by three datasets for training, development, and testing. To tackle this task, two methods: 1) using traditional machine learning (ML) with natural language preprocessing (NLP) for feature extraction, and 2) fine-tuning LLMs for text classification. The results show that transformer models, particularly LoRA-RoBERTa, exceed traditional ML methods in effectiveness, with majority voting being particularly effective in multilingual contexts for identifying machine-generated texts.

This paper addresses the limitations of traditional keyword-based search in understanding user intent and introduces a novel hybrid search approach that leverages the strengths of non-semantic search engines, Large Language Models (LLMs), and embedding models. The proposed system integrates keyword matching, semantic vector embeddings, and LLM-generated structured queries to deliver highly relevant and contextually appropriate search results. By combining these complementary methods, the hybrid approach effectively captures both explicit and implicit user intent.The paper further explores techniques to optimize query execution for faster response times and demonstrates the effectiveness of this hybrid search model in producing comprehensive and accurate search outcomes.

We introduce Korean Language Understanding Evaluation (KLUE) benchmark. KLUE is a collection of 8 Korean natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, including Topic Classification, SemanticTextual Similarity, Natural Language Inference, Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Dependency Parsing, Machine Reading Comprehension, and Dialogue State Tracking. We build all of the tasks from scratch from diverse source corpora while respecting copyrights, to ensure accessibility for anyone without any restrictions. With ethical considerations in mind, we carefully design annotation protocols. Along with the benchmark tasks and data, we provide suitable evaluation metrics and fine-tuning recipes for pretrained language models for each task. We furthermore release the pretrained language models (PLM), KLUE-BERT and KLUE-RoBERTa, to help reproducing baseline models on KLUE and thereby facilitate future research. We make a few interesting observations from the preliminary experiments using the proposed KLUE benchmark suite, already demonstrating the usefulness of this new benchmark suite. First, we find KLUE-RoBERTa-large outperforms other baselines, including multilingual PLMs and existing open-source Korean PLMs. Second, we see minimal degradation in performance even when we replace personally identifiable information from the pretraining corpus, suggesting that privacy and NLU capability are not at odds with each other. Lastly, we find that using BPE tokenization in combination with morpheme-level pre-tokenization is effective in tasks involving morpheme-level tagging, detection and generation. In addition to accelerating Korean NLP research, our comprehensive documentation on creating KLUE will facilitate creating similar resources for other languages in the future. KLUE is available at https://klue-benchmark.com.

The ability of generative large language models (LLMs) to perform in-context learning has given rise to a large body of research into how best to prompt models for various natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we focus on machine translation (MT), a task that has been shown to benefit from in-context translation examples. However no systematic studies have been published on how best to select examples, and mixed results have been reported on the usefulness of similarity-based selection over random selection. We provide a study covering multiple LLMs and multiple in-context example retrieval strategies, comparing multilingual sentence embeddings. We cover several language directions, representing different levels of language resourcedness (English into French, German, Swahili and Wolof). Contrarily to previously published results, we find that sentence embedding similarity can improve MT, especially for low-resource language directions, and discuss the balance between selection pool diversity and quality. We also highlight potential problems with the evaluation of LLM-based MT and suggest a more appropriate evaluation protocol, adapting the COMET metric to the evaluation of LLMs. Code and outputs are freely available at https://github.com/ArmelRandy/ICL-MT.

Users of natural language interfaces, generally powered by Large Language Models (LLMs),often must repeat their preferences each time they make a similar request. To alleviate this, we propose including some of a user's preferences and instructions in natural language -- collectively termed standing instructions -- as additional context for such interfaces. For example, when a user states I'm hungry, their previously expressed preference for Persian food will be automatically added to the LLM prompt, so as to influence the search for relevant restaurants. We develop NLSI, a language-to-program dataset consisting of over 2.4K dialogues spanning 17 domains, where each dialogue is paired with a user profile (a set of users specific standing instructions) and corresponding structured representations (API calls). A key challenge in NLSI is to identify which subset of the standing instructions is applicable to a given dialogue. NLSI contains diverse phenomena, from simple preferences to interdependent instructions such as triggering a hotel search whenever the user is booking tickets to an event. We conduct experiments on NLSI using prompting with large language models and various retrieval approaches, achieving a maximum of 44.7% exact match on API prediction. Our results demonstrate the challenges in identifying the relevant standing instructions and their interpretation into API calls.

We describe a system for building task-oriented dialogue systems combining the in-context learning abilities of large language models (LLMs) with the deterministic execution of business logic. LLMs are used to translate between the surface form of the conversation and a domain-specific language (DSL) which is used to progress the business logic. We compare our approach to the intent-based NLU approach predominantly used in industry today. Our experiments show that developing chatbots with our system requires significantly less effort than established approaches, that these chatbots can successfully navigate complex dialogues which are extremely challenging for NLU-based systems, and that our system has desirable properties for scaling task-oriented dialogue systems to a large number of tasks. We make our implementation available for use and further study.

LLM serving systems typically treat user prompts as monolithic inputs, optimizing inference through decoding tricks or inter-query batching. However, many real-world prompts contain latent semantic parallelism--decomposable structures where subtasks can be executed independently to reduce latency while preserving meaning. We introduce PARALLELPROMPT, the first benchmark for measuring intra-query parallelism in natural user prompts. Our dataset comprises over 37,000 real-world prompts from public LLM chat logs, each annotated with a structured schema capturing task templates, shared context, and iteration inputs. These schemas are extracted using LLM-assisted prompting with rule-based multilingual validation. To evaluate the benefits of decomposition, we provide an execution suite that benchmarks serial vs. parallel strategies, measuring latency, structural adherence, and semantic fidelity. Our results show that intra-query parallelism can be successfully parsed in over 75% of curated datasets, unlocking up to 5x speedups on tasks like translation, comprehension, and comparative analysis, with minimal quality degradation. By releasing this benchmark, curation pipeline, and evaluation suite, we provide the first standardized testbed for studying structure-aware execution in LLM serving pipelines.

This paper describes the IUST NLP Lab submission to the Prompting Large Language Models as Explainable Metrics Shared Task at the Eval4NLP 2023 Workshop on Evaluation & Comparison of NLP Systems. We have proposed a zero-shot prompt-based strategy for explainable evaluation of the summarization task using Large Language Models (LLMs). The conducted experiments demonstrate the promising potential of LLMs as evaluation metrics in Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly in the field of summarization. Both few-shot and zero-shot approaches are employed in these experiments. The performance of our best provided prompts achieved a Kendall correlation of 0.477 with human evaluations in the text summarization task on the test data. Code and results are publicly available on GitHub.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing tasks and beyond. This success of LLMs has led to a large influx of research contributions in this direction. These works encompass diverse topics such as architectural innovations, better training strategies, context length improvements, fine-tuning, multi-modal LLMs, robotics, datasets, benchmarking, efficiency, and more. With the rapid development of techniques and regular breakthroughs in LLM research, it has become considerably challenging to perceive the bigger picture of the advances in this direction. Considering the rapidly emerging plethora of literature on LLMs, it is imperative that the research community is able to benefit from a concise yet comprehensive overview of the recent developments in this field. This article provides an overview of the existing literature on a broad range of LLM-related concepts. Our self-contained comprehensive overview of LLMs discusses relevant background concepts along with covering the advanced topics at the frontier of research in LLMs. This review article is intended to not only provide a systematic survey but also a quick comprehensive reference for the researchers and practitioners to draw insights from extensive informative summaries of the existing works to advance the LLM research.

We introduce GEM, a living benchmark for natural language Generation (NLG), its Evaluation, and Metrics. Measuring progress in NLG relies on a constantly evolving ecosystem of automated metrics, datasets, and human evaluation standards. Due to this moving target, new models often still evaluate on divergent anglo-centric corpora with well-established, but flawed, metrics. This disconnect makes it challenging to identify the limitations of current models and opportunities for progress. Addressing this limitation, GEM provides an environment in which models can easily be applied to a wide set of tasks and in which evaluation strategies can be tested. Regular updates to the benchmark will help NLG research become more multilingual and evolve the challenge alongside models. This paper serves as the description of the data for which we are organizing a shared task at our ACL 2021 Workshop and to which we invite the entire NLG community to participate.

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.

As a primary means of information acquisition, information retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines, have integrated themselves into our daily lives. These systems also serve as components of dialogue, question-answering, and recommender systems. The trajectory of IR has evolved dynamically from its origins in term-based methods to its integration with advanced neural models. While the neural models excel at capturing complex contextual signals and semantic nuances, thereby reshaping the IR landscape, they still face challenges such as data scarcity, interpretability, and the generation of contextually plausible yet potentially inaccurate responses. This evolution requires a combination of both traditional methods (such as term-based sparse retrieval methods with rapid response) and modern neural architectures (such as language models with powerful language understanding capacity). Meanwhile, the emergence of large language models (LLMs), typified by ChatGPT and GPT-4, has revolutionized natural language processing due to their remarkable language understanding, generation, generalization, and reasoning abilities. Consequently, recent research has sought to leverage LLMs to improve IR systems. Given the rapid evolution of this research trajectory, it is necessary to consolidate existing methodologies and provide nuanced insights through a comprehensive overview. In this survey, we delve into the confluence of LLMs and IR systems, including crucial aspects such as query rewriters, retrievers, rerankers, and readers. Additionally, we explore promising directions within this expanding field.

Knowledge-intensive language tasks (KILT) usually require a large body of information to provide correct answers. A popular paradigm to solve this problem is to combine a search system with a machine reader, where the former retrieves supporting evidences and the latter examines them to produce answers. Recently, the reader component has witnessed significant advances with the help of large-scale pre-trained generative models. Meanwhile most existing solutions in the search component rely on the traditional ``index-retrieve-then-rank'' pipeline, which suffers from large memory footprint and difficulty in end-to-end optimization. Inspired by recent efforts in constructing model-based IR models, we propose to replace the traditional multi-step search pipeline with a novel single-step generative model, which can dramatically simplify the search process and be optimized in an end-to-end manner. We show that a strong generative retrieval model can be learned with a set of adequately designed pre-training tasks, and be adopted to improve a variety of downstream KILT tasks with further fine-tuning. We name the pre-trained generative retrieval model as CorpusBrain as all information about the corpus is encoded in its parameters without the need of constructing additional index. Empirical results show that CorpusBrain can significantly outperform strong baselines for the retrieval task on the KILT benchmark and establish new state-of-the-art downstream performances. We also show that CorpusBrain works well under zero- and low-resource settings.

Much recent research on information retrieval has focused on how to transfer from one task (typically with abundant supervised data) to various other tasks where supervision is limited, with the implicit assumption that it is possible to generalize from one task to all the rest. However, this overlooks the fact that there are many diverse and unique retrieval tasks, each targeting different search intents, queries, and search domains. In this paper, we suggest to work on Few-shot Dense Retrieval, a setting where each task comes with a short description and a few examples. To amplify the power of a few examples, we propose Prompt-base Query Generation for Retriever (Promptagator), which leverages large language models (LLM) as a few-shot query generator, and creates task-specific retrievers based on the generated data. Powered by LLM's generalization ability, Promptagator makes it possible to create task-specific end-to-end retrievers solely based on a few examples {without} using Natural Questions or MS MARCO to train %question generators or dual encoders. Surprisingly, LLM prompting with no more than 8 examples allows dual encoders to outperform heavily engineered models trained on MS MARCO like ColBERT v2 by more than 1.2 nDCG on average on 11 retrieval sets. Further training standard-size re-rankers using the same generated data yields another 5.0 point nDCG improvement. Our studies determine that query generation can be far more effective than previously observed, especially when a small amount of task-specific knowledge is given.

We present our submission to the Task 5 of SemEval-2025 that aims to aid librarians in assigning subject tags to the library records by producing a list of likely relevant tags for a given document. We frame the task as an information retrieval problem, where the document content is used to retrieve subject tags from a large subject taxonomy. We leverage two types of encoder models to build a two-stage information retrieval system -- a bi-encoder for coarse-grained candidate extraction at the first stage, and a cross-encoder for fine-grained re-ranking at the second stage. This approach proved effective, demonstrating significant improvements in recall compared to single-stage methods and showing competitive results according to qualitative evaluation.

Language models have steadily increased in size over the past few years. They achieve a high level of performance on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as question answering and summarization. Large language models (LLMs) have been used for generation and can now output human-like text. Due to this, there are other downstream tasks in the realm of dialog that can now harness the LLMs' language understanding capabilities. Dialog evaluation is one task that this paper will explore. It concentrates on prompting with LLMs: BLOOM, OPT, GPT-3, Flan-T5, InstructDial and TNLGv2. The paper shows that the choice of datasets used for training a model contributes to how well it performs on a task as well as on how the prompt should be structured. Specifically, the more diverse and relevant the group of datasets that a model is trained on, the better dialog evaluation performs. This paper also investigates how the number of examples in the prompt and the type of example selection used affect the model's performance.

For companies with customer service, mapping intents inside their conversational data is crucial in building applications based on natural language understanding (NLU). Nevertheless, there is no established automated technique to gather the intents from noisy online chats or voice transcripts. Simple clustering approaches are not suited to intent-sparse dialogues. To solve this intent-landscape task, we propose an unsupervised pipeline that extracts the intents and the taxonomy of intents from real-world dialogues. Our pipeline mines intent-span candidates with an extractive Question-Answering Electra model and leverages sentence embeddings to apply a low-level density clustering followed by a top-level hierarchical clustering. Our results demonstrate the generalization ability of an ELECTRA large model fine-tuned on the SQuAD2 dataset to understand dialogues. With the right prompting question, this model achieves a rate of linguistic validation on intent spans beyond 85%. We furthermore reconstructed the intent schemes of five domains from the MultiDoGo dataset with an average recall of 94.3%.

In recent years, a series of Transformer-based models unlocked major improvements in general natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Such a fast pace of research would not be possible without general NLU benchmarks, which allow for a fair comparison of the proposed methods. However, such benchmarks are available only for a handful of languages. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a comprehensive multi-task benchmark for the Polish language understanding, accompanied by an online leaderboard. It consists of a diverse set of tasks, adopted from existing datasets for named entity recognition, question-answering, textual entailment, and others. We also introduce a new sentiment analysis task for the e-commerce domain, named Allegro Reviews (AR). To ensure a common evaluation scheme and promote models that generalize to different NLU tasks, the benchmark includes datasets from varying domains and applications. Additionally, we release HerBERT, a Transformer-based model trained specifically for the Polish language, which has the best average performance and obtains the best results for three out of nine tasks. Finally, we provide an extensive evaluation, including several standard baselines and recently proposed, multilingual Transformer-based models.

Despite the widespread use of Transformer-based text embedding models in NLP tasks, surprising 'sticky tokens' can undermine the reliability of embeddings. These tokens, when repeatedly inserted into sentences, pull sentence similarity toward a certain value, disrupting the normal distribution of embedding distances and degrading downstream performance. In this paper, we systematically investigate such anomalous tokens, formally defining them and introducing an efficient detection method, Sticky Token Detector (STD), based on sentence and token filtering. Applying STD to 40 checkpoints across 14 model families, we discover a total of 868 sticky tokens. Our analysis reveals that these tokens often originate from special or unused entries in the vocabulary, as well as fragmented subwords from multilingual corpora. Notably, their presence does not strictly correlate with model size or vocabulary size. We further evaluate how sticky tokens affect downstream tasks like clustering and retrieval, observing significant performance drops of up to 50%. Through attention-layer analysis, we show that sticky tokens disproportionately dominate the model's internal representations, raising concerns about tokenization robustness. Our findings show the need for better tokenization strategies and model design to mitigate the impact of sticky tokens in future text embedding applications.

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.

We investigate the exploitation of both lexical and neural relevance signals for ad-hoc passage retrieval. Our exploration involves a large-scale training dataset in which dense neural representations of MS-MARCO queries and passages are complemented and integrated with 253 hand-crafted lexical features extracted from the same corpus. Blending of the relevance signals from the two different groups of features is learned by a classical Learning-to-Rank (LTR) model based on a forest of decision trees. To evaluate our solution, we employ a pipelined architecture where a dense neural retriever serves as the first stage and performs a nearest-neighbor search over the neural representations of the documents. Our LTR model acts instead as the second stage that re-ranks the set of candidates retrieved by the first stage to enhance effectiveness. The results of reproducible experiments conducted with state-of-the-art dense retrievers on publicly available resources show that the proposed solution significantly enhances the end-to-end ranking performance while relatively minimally impacting efficiency. Specifically, we achieve a boost in nDCG@10 of up to 11% with an increase in average query latency of only 4.3%. This confirms the advantage of seamlessly combining two distinct families of signals that mutually contribute to retrieval effectiveness.

Query expansion is a widely used technique to improve the recall of search systems. In this paper, we propose an approach to query expansion that leverages the generative abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional query expansion approaches such as Pseudo-Relevance Feedback (PRF) that relies on retrieving a good set of pseudo-relevant documents to expand queries, we rely on the generative and creative abilities of an LLM and leverage the knowledge inherent in the model. We study a variety of different prompts, including zero-shot, few-shot and Chain-of-Thought (CoT). We find that CoT prompts are especially useful for query expansion as these prompts instruct the model to break queries down step-by-step and can provide a large number of terms related to the original query. Experimental results on MS-MARCO and BEIR demonstrate that query expansions generated by LLMs can be more powerful than traditional query expansion methods.

Sentence encoder encode the semantics of their input, enabling key downstream applications such as classification, clustering, or retrieval. In this paper, we present Serafim PT*, a family of open-source sentence encoders for Portuguese with various sizes, suited to different hardware/compute budgets. Each model exhibits state-of-the-art performance and is made openly available under a permissive license, allowing its use for both commercial and research purposes. Besides the sentence encoders, this paper contributes a systematic study and lessons learned concerning the selection criteria of learning objectives and parameters that support top-performing encoders.

Neural networks -- especially those that use large, pre-trained language models -- have improved search engines in various ways. Most prominently, they can estimate the relevance of a passage or document to a user's query. In this work, we depart from this direction by exploring whether neural networks can effectively predict which of a document's passages are unlikely to be relevant to any query submitted to the search engine. We refer to this query-agnostic estimation of passage relevance as a passage's quality. We find that our novel methods for estimating passage quality allow passage corpora to be pruned considerably while maintaining statistically equivalent effectiveness; our best methods can consistently prune >25% of passages in a corpora, across various retrieval pipelines. Such substantial pruning reduces the operating costs of neural search engines in terms of computing resources, power usage, and carbon footprint -- both when processing queries (thanks to a smaller index size) and when indexing (lightweight models can prune low-quality passages prior to the costly dense or learned sparse encoding step). This work sets the stage for developing more advanced neural "learning-what-to-index" methods.

Although Indonesian is known to be the fourth most frequently used language over the internet, the research progress on this language in the natural language processing (NLP) is slow-moving due to a lack of available resources. In response, we introduce the first-ever vast resource for the training, evaluating, and benchmarking on Indonesian natural language understanding (IndoNLU) tasks. IndoNLU includes twelve tasks, ranging from single sentence classification to pair-sentences sequence labeling with different levels of complexity. The datasets for the tasks lie in different domains and styles to ensure task diversity. We also provide a set of Indonesian pre-trained models (IndoBERT) trained from a large and clean Indonesian dataset Indo4B collected from publicly available sources such as social media texts, blogs, news, and websites. We release baseline models for all twelve tasks, as well as the framework for benchmark evaluation, and thus it enables everyone to benchmark their system performances.

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

This paper accompanies the release of Opusparcus, a new paraphrase corpus for six European languages: German, English, Finnish, French, Russian, and Swedish. The corpus consists of paraphrases, that is, pairs of sentences in the same language that mean approximately the same thing. The paraphrases are extracted from the OpenSubtitles2016 corpus, which contains subtitles from movies and TV shows. The informal and colloquial genre that occurs in subtitles makes such data a very interesting language resource, for instance, from the perspective of computer assisted language learning. For each target language, the Opusparcus data have been partitioned into three types of data sets: training, development and test sets. The training sets are large, consisting of millions of sentence pairs, and have been compiled automatically, with the help of probabilistic ranking functions. The development and test sets consist of sentence pairs that have been checked manually; each set contains approximately 1000 sentence pairs that have been verified to be acceptable paraphrases by two annotators.

Long-context language models (LCLM), characterized by their extensive context window, is becoming increasingly popular. Meanwhile, many long-context benchmarks present challenging tasks that even the most advanced LCLMs struggle to complete. However, the underlying sources of various challenging long-context tasks have seldom been studied. To bridge this gap, we conduct experiments to indicate their difficulty stems primarily from two basic issues: "multi-matching retrieval," which requires the simultaneous retrieval of multiple items, and "logic-based retrieval," which necessitates logical judgment within retrieval criteria. These two problems, while seemingly straightforward, actually exceed the capabilities of LCLMs because they are proven to be hyper-multi-step (demanding numerous steps to solve) in nature. This finding could explain why LLMs struggle with more advanced long-context tasks, providing a more accurate perspective for rethinking solutions for them.

Typically, machine learning systems solve new tasks by training on thousands of examples. In contrast, humans can solve new tasks by reading some instructions, with perhaps an example or two. To take a step toward closing this gap, we introduce a framework for developing NLP systems that solve new tasks after reading their descriptions, synthesizing prior work in this area. We instantiate this framework with a new English language dataset, ZEST, structured for task-oriented evaluation on unseen tasks. Formulating task descriptions as questions, we ensure each is general enough to apply to many possible inputs, thus comprehensively evaluating a model's ability to solve each task. Moreover, the dataset's structure tests specific types of systematic generalization. We find that the state-of-the-art T5 model achieves a score of 12% on ZEST, leaving a significant challenge for NLP researchers.

Spoken Language Understanding infers semantic meaning directly from audio data, and thus promises to reduce error propagation and misunderstandings in end-user applications. However, publicly available SLU resources are limited. In this paper, we release SLURP, a new SLU package containing the following: (1) A new challenging dataset in English spanning 18 domains, which is substantially bigger and linguistically more diverse than existing datasets; (2) Competitive baselines based on state-of-the-art NLU and ASR systems; (3) A new transparent metric for entity labelling which enables a detailed error analysis for identifying potential areas of improvement. SLURP is available at https: //github.com/pswietojanski/slurp.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet they encounter challenges such as hallucination and the need for domain-specific knowledge. To mitigate these, recent methodologies have integrated information retrieved from external resources with LLMs, substantially enhancing their performance across NLP tasks. This survey paper addresses the absence of a comprehensive overview on Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (RALMs), both Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Retrieval-Augmented Understanding (RAU), providing an in-depth examination of their paradigm, evolution, taxonomy, and applications. The paper discusses the essential components of RALMs, including Retrievers, Language Models, and Augmentations, and how their interactions lead to diverse model structures and applications. RALMs demonstrate utility in a spectrum of tasks, from translation and dialogue systems to knowledge-intensive applications. The survey includes several evaluation methods of RALMs, emphasizing the importance of robustness, accuracy, and relevance in their assessment. It also acknowledges the limitations of RALMs, particularly in retrieval quality and computational efficiency, offering directions for future research. In conclusion, this survey aims to offer a structured insight into RALMs, their potential, and the avenues for their future development in NLP. The paper is supplemented with a Github Repository containing the surveyed works and resources for further study: https://github.com/2471023025/RALM_Survey.

Text ranking is a critical task in various information retrieval applications, and the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in natural language processing has sparked interest in their application to text ranking. These methods primarily involve combining query and candidate documents and leveraging prompt learning to determine query-document relevance using the LLM's output probabilities for specific tokens or by directly generating a ranked list of candidate documents. Although these approaches have demonstrated promise, a noteworthy disparity arises between the training objective of LLMs, which typically centers around next token prediction, and the objective of evaluating query-document relevance. To address this gap and fully leverage LLM potential in text ranking tasks, we propose a progressive multi-stage training strategy. Firstly, we introduce a large-scale weakly supervised dataset of relevance texts to enable the LLMs to acquire the ability to predict relevant tokens without altering their original training objective. Subsequently, we incorporate supervised training to further enhance LLM ranking capability. Our experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method compared to previous competitive approaches, both in in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios.

We introduce LexBench, a comprehensive evaluation suite enabled to test language models (LMs) on ten semantic phrase processing tasks. Unlike prior studies, it is the first work to propose a framework from the comparative perspective to model the general semantic phrase (i.e., lexical collocation) and three fine-grained semantic phrases, including idiomatic expression, noun compound, and verbal construction. Thanks to \ourbenchmark, we assess the performance of 15 LMs across model architectures and parameter scales in classification, extraction, and interpretation tasks. Through the experiments, we first validate the scaling law and find that, as expected, large models excel better than the smaller ones in most tasks. Second, we investigate further through the scaling semantic relation categorization and find that few-shot LMs still lag behind vanilla fine-tuned models in the task. Third, through human evaluation, we find that the performance of strong models is comparable to the human level regarding semantic phrase processing. Our benchmarking findings can serve future research aiming to improve the generic capability of LMs on semantic phrase comprehension. Our source code and data are available at https://github.com/jacklanda/LexBench

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.

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.

We present Mr. TyDi, a multi-lingual benchmark dataset for mono-lingual retrieval in eleven typologically diverse languages, designed to evaluate ranking with learned dense representations. The goal of this resource is to spur research in dense retrieval techniques in non-English languages, motivated by recent observations that existing techniques for representation learning perform poorly when applied to out-of-distribution data. As a starting point, we provide zero-shot baselines for this new dataset based on a multi-lingual adaptation of DPR that we call "mDPR". Experiments show that although the effectiveness of mDPR is much lower than BM25, dense representations nevertheless appear to provide valuable relevance signals, improving BM25 results in sparse-dense hybrids. In addition to analyses of our results, we also discuss future challenges and present a research agenda in multi-lingual dense retrieval. Mr. TyDi can be downloaded at https://github.com/castorini/mr.tydi.

Recent work finds that retrieval-augmented generation with large language models is prone to be influenced by the order of retrieved documents in the context. However, the lack of in-depth analysis limits the use of this phenomenon for prompt engineering in practice. In this study, we posit that likelihoods serve as an effective gauge for language model performance. Through experiments on two question-answering datasets with a variety of state-of-the-art language models, we reveal correlations between answer accuracy and the likelihood of the question at both the corpus level and the instance level. In addition, we find that question likelihood can also indicate the position of the task-relevant information in the context. Based on these findings, we propose two methods that use question likelihood as a gauge for selecting and constructing prompts that lead to better performance. We demonstrate their effectiveness with experiments. In addition, our likelihood-based methods are efficient, as they only need to compute the likelihood of the input, requiring much fewer language model passes than heuristic prompt engineering methods that require generating responses. Our analysis deepens our understanding of how input prompts affect model performance and provides a promising direction for efficient prompt optimization.

We present a new Icelandic-English parallel corpus, the Icelandic Parallel Abstracts Corpus (IPAC), composed of abstracts from student theses and dissertations. The texts were collected from the Skemman repository which keeps records of all theses, dissertations and final projects from students at Icelandic universities. The corpus was aligned based on sentence-level BLEU scores, in both translation directions, from NMT models using Bleualign. The result is a corpus of 64k sentence pairs from over 6 thousand parallel abstracts.

Retrieval-augmented in-context learning has emerged as a powerful approach for addressing knowledge-intensive tasks using frozen language models (LM) and retrieval models (RM). Existing work has combined these in simple "retrieve-then-read" pipelines in which the RM retrieves passages that are inserted into the LM prompt. To begin to fully realize the potential of frozen LMs and RMs, we propose Demonstrate-Search-Predict (DSP), a framework that relies on passing natural language texts in sophisticated pipelines between an LM and an RM. DSP can express high-level programs that bootstrap pipeline-aware demonstrations, search for relevant passages, and generate grounded predictions, systematically breaking down problems into small transformations that the LM and RM can handle more reliably. We have written novel DSP programs for answering questions in open-domain, multi-hop, and conversational settings, establishing in early evaluations new state-of-the-art in-context learning results and delivering 37-120%, 8-39%, and 80-290% relative gains against the vanilla LM (GPT-3.5), a standard retrieve-then-read pipeline, and a contemporaneous self-ask pipeline, respectively. We release DSP at https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dsp

We present a dataset of word usage graphs (WUGs), where the existing WUGs for multiple languages are enriched with cluster labels functioning as sense definitions. They are generated from scratch by fine-tuned encoder-decoder language models. The conducted human evaluation has shown that these definitions match the existing clusters in WUGs better than the definitions chosen from WordNet by two baseline systems. At the same time, the method is straightforward to use and easy to extend to new languages. The resulting enriched datasets can be extremely helpful for moving on to explainable semantic change modeling.

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.

Spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks have been studied for many decades in the speech research community, but have not received as much attention as lower-level tasks like speech and speaker recognition. In particular, there are not nearly as many SLU task benchmarks, and many of the existing ones use data that is not freely available to all researchers. Recent work has begun to introduce such benchmark datasets for several tasks. In this work, we introduce several new annotated SLU benchmark tasks based on freely available speech data, which complement existing benchmarks and address gaps in the SLU evaluation landscape. We contribute four tasks: question answering and summarization involve inference over longer speech sequences; named entity localization addresses the speech-specific task of locating the targeted content in the signal; dialog act classification identifies the function of a given speech utterance. We follow the blueprint of the Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation (SLUE) benchmark suite. In order to facilitate the development of SLU models that leverage the success of pre-trained speech representations, we will be publishing for each task (i) annotations for a relatively small fine-tuning set, (ii) annotated development and test sets, and (iii) baseline models for easy reproducibility and comparisons. In this work, we present the details of data collection and annotation and the performance of the baseline models. We also perform sensitivity analysis of pipeline models' performance (speech recognizer + text model) to the speech recognition accuracy, using more than 20 state-of-the-art speech recognition models.

Topic modeling is a well-established technique for exploring text corpora. Conventional topic models (e.g., LDA) represent topics as bags of words that often require "reading the tea leaves" to interpret; additionally, they offer users minimal semantic control over topics. To tackle these issues, we introduce TopicGPT, a prompt-based framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to uncover latent topics within a provided text collection. TopicGPT produces topics that align better with human categorizations compared to competing methods: for example, it achieves a harmonic mean purity of 0.74 against human-annotated Wikipedia topics compared to 0.64 for the strongest baseline. Its topics are also more interpretable, dispensing with ambiguous bags of words in favor of topics with natural language labels and associated free-form descriptions. Moreover, the framework is highly adaptable, allowing users to specify constraints and modify topics without the need for model retraining. TopicGPT can be further extended to hierarchical topical modeling, enabling users to explore topics at various levels of granularity. By streamlining access to high-quality and interpretable topics, TopicGPT represents a compelling, human-centered approach to topic modeling.

Information seeking and integration is a complex cognitive task that consumes enormous time and effort. Inspired by the remarkable progress of Large Language Models, recent works attempt to solve this task by combining LLMs and search engines. However, these methods still obtain unsatisfying performance due to three challenges: (1) complex requests often cannot be accurately and completely retrieved by the search engine once (2) corresponding information to be integrated is spread over multiple web pages along with massive noise, and (3) a large number of web pages with long contents may quickly exceed the maximum context length of LLMs. Inspired by the cognitive process when humans solve these problems, we introduce MindSearch to mimic the human minds in web information seeking and integration, which can be instantiated by a simple yet effective LLM-based multi-agent framework. The WebPlanner models the human mind of multi-step information seeking as a dynamic graph construction process: it decomposes the user query into atomic sub-questions as nodes in the graph and progressively extends the graph based on the search result from WebSearcher. Tasked with each sub-question, WebSearcher performs hierarchical information retrieval with search engines and collects valuable information for WebPlanner. The multi-agent design of MindSearch enables the whole framework to seek and integrate information parallelly from larger-scale (e.g., more than 300) web pages in 3 minutes, which is worth 3 hours of human effort. MindSearch demonstrates significant improvement in the response quality in terms of depth and breadth, on both close-set and open-set QA problems. Besides, responses from MindSearch based on InternLM2.5-7B are preferable by humans to ChatGPT-Web and Perplexity.ai applications, which implies that MindSearch can already deliver a competitive solution to the proprietary AI search engine.

The Needle-in-a-Haystack (NIAH) benchmark is widely used to evaluate Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to understand long contexts (LC). It evaluates the capability to identify query-relevant context within extensive query-irrelevant passages. Although this method serves as a widely accepted standard for evaluating long-context understanding, our findings suggest it may overestimate the true LC capability of LLMs. We demonstrate that even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o struggle to intactly incorporate given contexts made up of solely query-relevant ten sentences. In response, we introduce a novel benchmark, NeedleChain, where the context consists entirely of query-relevant information, requiring the LLM to fully grasp the input to answer correctly. Our benchmark allows for flexible context length and reasoning order, offering a more comprehensive analysis of LLM performance. Additionally, we propose an extremely simple yet compelling strategy to improve LC understanding capability of LLM: ROPE Contraction. Our experiments with various advanced LLMs reveal a notable disparity between their ability to process large contexts and their capacity to fully understand them. Source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/hyeonseokk/NeedleChain

This systematic review explores the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Combinatorial Optimization (CO). We report our findings using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. We conduct a literature search via Scopus and Google Scholar, examining over 2,000 publications. We assess publications against four inclusion and four exclusion criteria related to their language, research focus, publication year, and type. Eventually, we select 103 studies. We classify these studies into semantic categories and topics to provide a comprehensive overview of the field, including the tasks performed by LLMs, the architectures of LLMs, the existing datasets specifically designed for evaluating LLMs in CO, and the field of application. Finally, we identify future directions for leveraging LLMs in this field.

The remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has ushered natural language processing (NLP) research into a new era. Despite their diverse capabilities, LLMs trained on different corpora exhibit varying strengths and weaknesses, leading to challenges in maximizing their overall efficiency and versatility. To address these challenges, recent studies have explored collaborative strategies for LLMs. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of this emerging research area, highlighting the motivation behind such collaborations. Specifically, we categorize collaborative strategies into three primary approaches: Merging, Ensemble, and Cooperation. Merging involves integrating multiple LLMs in the parameter space. Ensemble combines the outputs of various LLMs. Cooperation} leverages different LLMs to allow full play to their diverse capabilities for specific tasks. We provide in-depth introductions to these methods from different perspectives and discuss their potential applications. Additionally, we outline future research directions, hoping this work will catalyze further studies on LLM collaborations and paving the way for advanced NLP applications.

Text is by far the most ubiquitous source of knowledge and information and should be made easily accessible to as many people as possible; however, texts often contain complex words that hinder reading comprehension and accessibility. Therefore, suggesting simpler alternatives for complex words without compromising meaning would help convey the information to a broader audience. This paper proposes mTLS, a multilingual controllable Transformer-based Lexical Simplification (LS) system fined-tuned with the T5 model. The novelty of this work lies in the use of language-specific prefixes, control tokens, and candidates extracted from pre-trained masked language models to learn simpler alternatives for complex words. The evaluation results on three well-known LS datasets -- LexMTurk, BenchLS, and NNSEval -- show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models like LSBert and ConLS. Moreover, further evaluation of our approach on the part of the recent TSAR-2022 multilingual LS shared-task dataset shows that our model performs competitively when compared with the participating systems for English LS and even outperforms the GPT-3 model on several metrics. Moreover, our model obtains performance gains also for Spanish and Portuguese.

We present the GenAI Content Detection Task~1 -- a shared task on binary machine generated text detection, conducted as a part of the GenAI workshop at COLING 2025. The task consists of two subtasks: Monolingual (English) and Multilingual. The shared task attracted many participants: 36 teams made official submissions to the Monolingual subtask during the test phase and 26 teams -- to the Multilingual. We provide a comprehensive overview of the data, a summary of the results -- including system rankings and performance scores -- detailed descriptions of the participating systems, and an in-depth analysis of submissions. https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/COLING-2025-Workshop-on-MGT-Detection-Task1

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success as general-purpose task solvers across various fields, including NLP, healthcare, finance, and law. However, their capabilities remain limited when addressing domain-specific problems, particularly in downstream NLP tasks. Research has shown that models fine-tuned on instruction-based downstream NLP datasets outperform those that are not fine-tuned. While most efforts in this area have primarily focused on resource-rich languages like English and broad domains, little attention has been given to multilingual settings and specific domains. To address this gap, this study focuses on developing a specialized LLM, LlamaLens, for analyzing news and social media content in a multilingual context. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle both domain specificity and multilinguality, with a particular focus on news and social media. Our experimental setup includes 19 tasks, represented by 52 datasets covering Arabic, English, and Hindi. We demonstrate that LlamaLens outperforms the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) on 16 testing sets, and achieves comparable performance on 10 sets. We make the models and resources publicly available for the research community.(https://huggingface.co/QCRI)

As the context limits of Large Language Models (LLMs) increase, the range of possible applications and downstream functions broadens. In many real-world tasks, decisions depend on details scattered across collections of often disparate documents containing mostly irrelevant information. Long-context LLMs appear well-suited to this form of complex information retrieval and reasoning, which has traditionally proven costly and time-consuming. However, although the development of longer context models has seen rapid gains in recent years, our understanding of how effectively LLMs use their context has not kept pace. To address this, we conduct a set of retrieval experiments designed to evaluate the capabilities of 17 leading LLMs, such as their ability to follow threads of information through the context window. Strikingly, we find that many models are remarkably threadsafe: capable of simultaneously following multiple threads without significant loss in performance. Still, for many models, we find the effective context limit is significantly shorter than the supported context length, with accuracy decreasing as the context window grows. Our study also highlights the important point that token counts from different tokenizers should not be directly compared -- they often correspond to substantially different numbers of written characters. We release our code and long-context experimental data.

A machine learning system can score well on a given test set by relying on heuristics that are effective for frequent example types but break down in more challenging cases. We study this issue within natural language inference (NLI), the task of determining whether one sentence entails another. We hypothesize that statistical NLI models may adopt three fallible syntactic heuristics: the lexical overlap heuristic, the subsequence heuristic, and the constituent heuristic. To determine whether models have adopted these heuristics, we introduce a controlled evaluation set called HANS (Heuristic Analysis for NLI Systems), which contains many examples where the heuristics fail. We find that models trained on MNLI, including BERT, a state-of-the-art model, perform very poorly on HANS, suggesting that they have indeed adopted these heuristics. We conclude that there is substantial room for improvement in NLI systems, and that the HANS dataset can motivate and measure progress in this area

Large language models (LLMs) are a class of language models that have demonstrated outstanding performance across a range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks and have become a highly sought-after research area, because of their ability to generate human-like language and their potential to revolutionize science and technology. In this study, we conduct bibliometric and discourse analyses of scholarly literature on LLMs. Synthesizing over 5,000 publications, this paper serves as a roadmap for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to navigate the current landscape of LLMs research. We present the research trends from 2017 to early 2023, identifying patterns in research paradigms and collaborations. We start with analyzing the core algorithm developments and NLP tasks that are fundamental in LLMs research. We then investigate the applications of LLMs in various fields and domains including medicine, engineering, social science, and humanities. Our review also reveals the dynamic, fast-paced evolution of LLMs research. Overall, this paper offers valuable insights into the current state, impact, and potential of LLMs research and its applications.

Conversational passage retrieval is challenging as it often requires the resolution of references to previous utterances and needs to deal with the complexities of natural language, such as coreference and ellipsis. To address these challenges, pre-trained sequence-to-sequence neural query rewriters are commonly used to generate a single de-contextualized query based on conversation history. Previous research shows that combining multiple query rewrites for the same user utterance has a positive effect on retrieval performance. We propose the use of a neural query rewriter to generate multiple queries and show how to integrate those queries in the passage retrieval pipeline efficiently. The main strength of our approach lies in its simplicity: it leverages how the beam search algorithm works and can produce multiple query rewrites at no additional cost. Our contributions further include devising ways to utilize multi-query rewrites in both sparse and dense first-pass retrieval. We demonstrate that applying our approach on top of a standard passage retrieval pipeline delivers state-of-the-art performance without sacrificing efficiency.

Large language models (LLMs) can be used to generate smaller, more refined datasets via few-shot prompting for benchmarking, fine-tuning or other use cases. However, understanding and evaluating these datasets is difficult, and the failure modes of LLM-generated data are still not well understood. Specifically, the data can be repetitive in surprising ways, not only semantically but also syntactically and lexically. We present LinguisticLens, a novel inter-active visualization tool for making sense of and analyzing syntactic diversity of LLM-generated datasets. LinguisticLens clusters text along syntactic, lexical, and semantic axes. It supports hierarchical visualization of a text dataset, allowing users to quickly scan for an overview and inspect individual examples. The live demo is available at shorturl.at/zHOUV.

This work investigates the ability of open Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict citation intent through in-context learning and fine-tuning. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on pre-trained models like SciBERT, which require extensive domain-specific pretraining and specialized architectures, we demonstrate that general-purpose LLMs can be adapted to this task with minimal task-specific data. We evaluate twelve model variations across five prominent open LLM families using zero, one, few, and many-shot prompting to assess performance across scenarios. Our experimental study identifies the top-performing model through extensive experimentation of in-context learning-related parameters, which we fine-tune to further enhance task performance. The results highlight the strengths and limitations of LLMs in recognizing citation intents, providing valuable insights for model selection and prompt engineering. Additionally, we make our end-to-end evaluation framework and models openly available for future use.

Listeners of long-form talk-audio content, such as podcast episodes, often find it challenging to understand the overall structure and locate relevant sections. A practical solution is to divide episodes into chapters--semantically coherent segments labeled with titles and timestamps. Since most episodes on our platform at Spotify currently lack creator-provided chapters, automating the creation of chapters is essential. Scaling the chapterization of podcast episodes presents unique challenges. First, episodes tend to be less structured than written texts, featuring spontaneous discussions with nuanced transitions. Second, the transcripts are usually lengthy, averaging about 16,000 tokens, which necessitates efficient processing that can preserve context. To address these challenges, we introduce PODTILE, a fine-tuned encoder-decoder transformer to segment conversational data. The model simultaneously generates chapter transitions and titles for the input transcript. To preserve context, each input text is augmented with global context, including the episode's title, description, and previous chapter titles. In our intrinsic evaluation, PODTILE achieved an 11% improvement in ROUGE score over the strongest baseline. Additionally, we provide insights into the practical benefits of auto-generated chapters for listeners navigating episode content. Our findings indicate that auto-generated chapters serve as a useful tool for engaging with less popular podcasts. Finally, we present empirical evidence that using chapter titles can enhance effectiveness of sparse retrieval in search tasks.

We present a corpus of 5,000 richly annotated abstracts of medical articles describing clinical randomized controlled trials. Annotations include demarcations of text spans that describe the Patient population enrolled, the Interventions studied and to what they were Compared, and the Outcomes measured (the `PICO' elements). These spans are further annotated at a more granular level, e.g., individual interventions within them are marked and mapped onto a structured medical vocabulary. We acquired annotations from a diverse set of workers with varying levels of expertise and cost. We describe our data collection process and the corpus itself in detail. We then outline a set of challenging NLP tasks that would aid searching of the medical literature and the practice of evidence-based medicine.

Text embeddings have attracted growing interest due to their effectiveness across a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as retrieval, classification, clustering, bitext mining, and summarization. With the emergence of pretrained language models (PLMs), general-purpose text embeddings (GPTE) have gained significant traction for their ability to produce rich, transferable representations. The general architecture of GPTE typically leverages PLMs to derive dense text representations, which are then optimized through contrastive learning on large-scale pairwise datasets. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of GPTE in the era of PLMs, focusing on the roles PLMs play in driving its development. We first examine the fundamental architecture and describe the basic roles of PLMs in GPTE, i.e., embedding extraction, expressivity enhancement, training strategies, learning objectives, and data construction. Then, we describe advanced roles enabled by PLMs, such as multilingual support, multimodal integration, code understanding, and scenario-specific adaptation. Finally, we highlight potential future research directions that move beyond traditional improvement goals, including ranking integration, safety considerations, bias mitigation, structural information incorporation, and the cognitive extension of embeddings. This survey aims to serve as a valuable reference for both newcomers and established researchers seeking to understand the current state and future potential of GPTE.

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.

Passage ranking involves two stages: passage retrieval and passage re-ranking, which are important and challenging topics for both academics and industries in the area of Information Retrieval (IR). However, the commonly-used datasets for passage ranking usually focus on the English language. For non-English scenarios, such as Chinese, the existing datasets are limited in terms of data scale, fine-grained relevance annotation and false negative issues. To address this problem, we introduce T2Ranking, a large-scale Chinese benchmark for passage ranking. T2Ranking comprises more than 300K queries and over 2M unique passages from real-world search engines. Expert annotators are recruited to provide 4-level graded relevance scores (fine-grained) for query-passage pairs instead of binary relevance judgments (coarse-grained). To ease the false negative issues, more passages with higher diversities are considered when performing relevance annotations, especially in the test set, to ensure a more accurate evaluation. Apart from the textual query and passage data, other auxiliary resources are also provided, such as query types and XML files of documents which passages are generated from, to facilitate further studies. To evaluate the dataset, commonly used ranking models are implemented and tested on T2Ranking as baselines. The experimental results show that T2Ranking is challenging and there is still scope for improvement. The full data and all codes are available at https://github.com/THUIR/T2Ranking/

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has inaugurated a transformative epoch in natural language processing, fostering unprecedented proficiency in text generation, comprehension, and contextual scrutiny. Nevertheless, effectively handling extensive contexts, crucial for myriad applications, poses a formidable obstacle owing to the intrinsic constraints of the models' context window sizes and the computational burdens entailed by their operations. This investigation presents an innovative framework that strategically tailors LLMs for streamlined context processing by harnessing the synergies among natural language summarization, soft prompt compression, and augmented utility preservation mechanisms. Our methodology, dubbed SoftPromptComp, amalgamates natural language prompts extracted from summarization methodologies with dynamically generated soft prompts to forge a concise yet semantically robust depiction of protracted contexts. This depiction undergoes further refinement via a weighting mechanism optimizing information retention and utility for subsequent tasks. We substantiate that our framework markedly diminishes computational overhead and enhances LLMs' efficacy across various benchmarks, while upholding or even augmenting the caliber of the produced content. By amalgamating soft prompt compression with sophisticated summarization, SoftPromptComp confronts the dual challenges of managing lengthy contexts and ensuring model scalability. Our findings point towards a propitious trajectory for augmenting LLMs' applicability and efficiency, rendering them more versatile and pragmatic for real-world applications. This research enriches the ongoing discourse on optimizing language models, providing insights into the potency of soft prompts and summarization techniques as pivotal instruments for the forthcoming generation of NLP solutions.

Task semantics can be expressed by a set of input-to-output examples or a piece of textual instruction. Conventional machine learning approaches for natural language processing (NLP) mainly rely on the availability of large-scale sets of task-specific examples. Two issues arise: first, collecting task-specific labeled examples does not apply to scenarios where tasks may be too complicated or costly to annotate, or the system is required to handle a new task immediately; second, this is not user-friendly since end-users are probably more willing to provide task description rather than a set of examples before using the system. Therefore, the community is paying increasing interest in a new supervision-seeking paradigm for NLP: learning from task instructions. Despite its impressive progress, there are some common issues that the community struggles with. This survey paper tries to summarize and provide insights into the current research on instruction learning, particularly by answering the following questions: (i) What is task instruction, and what instruction types exist? (ii) How to model instructions? (iii) What factors influence and explain the instructions' performance? (iv) What challenges remain in instruction learning? To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey about textual instructions.

High-quality phrase representations are essential to finding topics and related terms in documents (a.k.a. topic mining). Existing phrase representation learning methods either simply combine unigram representations in a context-free manner or rely on extensive annotations to learn context-aware knowledge. In this paper, we propose UCTopic, a novel unsupervised contrastive learning framework for context-aware phrase representations and topic mining. UCTopic is pretrained in a large scale to distinguish if the contexts of two phrase mentions have the same semantics. The key to pretraining is positive pair construction from our phrase-oriented assumptions. However, we find traditional in-batch negatives cause performance decay when finetuning on a dataset with small topic numbers. Hence, we propose cluster-assisted contrastive learning(CCL) which largely reduces noisy negatives by selecting negatives from clusters and further improves phrase representations for topics accordingly. UCTopic outperforms the state-of-the-art phrase representation model by 38.2% NMI in average on four entity cluster-ing tasks. Comprehensive evaluation on topic mining shows that UCTopic can extract coherent and diverse topical phrases.

We propose MultiDoc2Dial, a new task and dataset on modeling goal-oriented dialogues grounded in multiple documents. Most previous works treat document-grounded dialogue modeling as a machine reading comprehension task based on a single given document or passage. In this work, we aim to address more realistic scenarios where a goal-oriented information-seeking conversation involves multiple topics, and hence is grounded on different documents. To facilitate such a task, we introduce a new dataset that contains dialogues grounded in multiple documents from four different domains. We also explore modeling the dialogue-based and document-based context in the dataset. We present strong baseline approaches and various experimental results, aiming to support further research efforts on such a task.

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have shown remarkable performances in recent years, setting a new paradigm for NLP research and industry. The legal domain has received some attention from the NLP community partly due to its textual nature. Some tasks from this domain are represented by question-answering (QA) tasks. This work explores the legal domain Multiple-Choice QA (MCQA) for a low-resource language. The contribution of this work is multi-fold. We first introduce JuRO, the first openly available Romanian legal MCQA dataset, comprising three different examinations and a number of 10,836 total questions. Along with this dataset, we introduce CROL, an organized corpus of laws that has a total of 93 distinct documents with their modifications from 763 time spans, that we leveraged in this work for Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. Moreover, we are the first to propose Law-RoG, a Knowledge Graph (KG) for the Romanian language, and this KG is derived from the aforementioned corpus. Lastly, we propose a novel approach for MCQA, Graph Retrieval Augmented by Facts (GRAF), which achieves competitive results with generally accepted SOTA methods and even exceeds them in most settings.

The Natural Language for Optimization (NL4Opt) Competition was created to investigate methods of extracting the meaning and formulation of an optimization problem based on its text description. Specifically, the goal of the competition is to increase the accessibility and usability of optimization solvers by allowing non-experts to interface with them using natural language. We separate this challenging goal into two sub-tasks: (1) recognize and label the semantic entities that correspond to the components of the optimization problem; (2) generate a meaning representation (i.e., a logical form) of the problem from its detected problem entities. The first task aims to reduce ambiguity by detecting and tagging the entities of the optimization problems. The second task creates an intermediate representation of the linear programming (LP) problem that is converted into a format that can be used by commercial solvers. In this report, we present the LP word problem dataset and shared tasks for the NeurIPS 2022 competition. Furthermore, we investigate and compare the performance of the ChatGPT large language model against the winning solutions. Through this competition, we hope to bring interest towards the development of novel machine learning applications and datasets for optimization modeling.

Humanities scholars commonly provide evidence for claims that they make about a work of literature (e.g., a novel) in the form of quotations from the work. We collect a large-scale dataset (RELiC) of 78K literary quotations and surrounding critical analysis and use it to formulate the novel task of literary evidence retrieval, in which models are given an excerpt of literary analysis surrounding a masked quotation and asked to retrieve the quoted passage from the set of all passages in the work. Solving this retrieval task requires a deep understanding of complex literary and linguistic phenomena, which proves challenging to methods that overwhelmingly rely on lexical and semantic similarity matching. We implement a RoBERTa-based dense passage retriever for this task that outperforms existing pretrained information retrieval baselines; however, experiments and analysis by human domain experts indicate that there is substantial room for improvement over our dense retriever.

We introduce N-LTP, an open-source neural language technology platform supporting six fundamental Chinese NLP tasks: {lexical analysis} (Chinese word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition), {syntactic parsing} (dependency parsing), and {semantic parsing} (semantic dependency parsing and semantic role labeling). Unlike the existing state-of-the-art toolkits, such as Stanza, that adopt an independent model for each task, N-LTP adopts the multi-task framework by using a shared pre-trained model, which has the advantage of capturing the shared knowledge across relevant Chinese tasks. In addition, a knowledge distillation method DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1907-04829 where the single-task model teaches the multi-task model is further introduced to encourage the multi-task model to surpass its single-task teacher. Finally, we provide a collection of easy-to-use APIs and a visualization tool to make users to use and view the processing results more easily and directly. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first toolkit to support six Chinese NLP fundamental tasks. Source code, documentation, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/HIT-SCIR/ltp.

As an efficient approach to understand, generate, and process natural language texts, research in natural language processing (NLP) has exhibited a rapid spread and wide adoption in recent years. Given the increasing research work in this area, several NLP-related approaches have been surveyed in the research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics, identifies trends, and outlines areas for future research remains absent. Contributing to closing this gap, we have systematically classified and analyzed research papers in the ACL Anthology. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of fields of study in NLP, analyze recent developments in NLP, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.

In this work we address the problem of argument search. The purpose of argument search is the distillation of pro and contra arguments for requested topics from large text corpora. In previous works, the usual approach is to use a standard search engine to extract text parts which are relevant to the given topic and subsequently use an argument recognition algorithm to select arguments from them. The main challenge in the argument recognition task, which is also known as argument mining, is that often sentences containing arguments are structurally similar to purely informative sentences without any stance about the topic. In fact, they only differ semantically. Most approaches use topic or search term information only for the first search step and therefore assume that arguments can be classified independently of a topic. We argue that topic information is crucial for argument mining, since the topic defines the semantic context of an argument. Precisely, we propose different models for the classification of arguments, which take information about a topic of an argument into account. Moreover, to enrich the context of a topic and to let models understand the context of the potential argument better, we integrate information from different external sources such as Knowledge Graphs or pre-trained NLP models. Our evaluation shows that considering topic information, especially in connection with external information, provides a significant performance boost for the argument mining task.

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) for relevance assessments offers promising opportunities to improve Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and related fields. Indeed, LLMs hold the promise of allowing IR experimenters to build evaluation collections with a fraction of the manual human labor currently required. This could help with fresh topics on which there is still limited knowledge and could mitigate the challenges of evaluating ranking systems in low-resource scenarios, where it is challenging to find human annotators. Given the fast-paced recent developments in the domain, many questions concerning LLMs as assessors are yet to be answered. Among the aspects that require further investigation, we can list the impact of various components in a relevance judgment generation pipeline, such as the prompt used or the LLM chosen. This paper benchmarks and reports on the results of a large-scale automatic relevance judgment evaluation, the LLMJudge challenge at SIGIR 2024, where different relevance assessment approaches were proposed. In detail, we release and benchmark 42 LLM-generated labels of the TREC 2023 Deep Learning track relevance judgments produced by eight international teams who participated in the challenge. Given their diverse nature, these automatically generated relevance judgments can help the community not only investigate systematic biases caused by LLMs but also explore the effectiveness of ensemble models, analyze the trade-offs between different models and human assessors, and advance methodologies for improving automated evaluation techniques. The released resource is available at the following link: https://llm4eval.github.io/LLMJudge-benchmark/

Large language models (LLMs) under-perform on low-resource languages due to limited training data. We present a method to efficiently collect text data for low-resource languages from the entire Common Crawl corpus. Our approach, UnifiedCrawl, filters and extracts common crawl using minimal compute resources, yielding mono-lingual datasets much larger than previously available sources. We demonstrate that leveraging this data to fine-tuning multilingual LLMs via efficient adapter methods (QLoRA) significantly boosts performance on the low-resource language, while minimizing VRAM usage. Our experiments show large improvements in language modeling perplexity and an increase in few-shot prompting scores. Our work and released source code provide an affordable approach to improve LLMs for low-resource languages using consumer hardware. Our source code is available here at https://github.com/bethelmelesse/unifiedcrawl.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in important tasks such as natural language understanding, language generation, and complex reasoning and have the potential to make a substantial impact on our society. Such capabilities, however, come with the considerable resources they demand, highlighting the strong need to develop effective techniques for addressing their efficiency challenges. In this survey, we provide a systematic and comprehensive review of efficient LLMs research. We organize the literature in a taxonomy consisting of three main categories, covering distinct yet interconnected efficient LLMs topics from model-centric, data-centric, and framework-centric perspective, respectively. We have also created a GitHub repository where we compile the papers featured in this survey at https://github.com/AIoT-MLSys-Lab/EfficientLLMs, and will actively maintain this repository and incorporate new research as it emerges. We hope our survey can serve as a valuable resource to help researchers and practitioners gain a systematic understanding of the research developments in efficient LLMs and inspire them to contribute to this important and exciting field.

The vast majority of non-English corpora are derived from automatically filtered versions of CommonCrawl. While prior work has identified major issues on the quality of these datasets (Kreutzer et al., 2021), it is not clear how this impacts downstream performance. Taking representation learning in Basque as a case study, we explore tailored crawling (manually identifying and scraping websites with high-quality content) as an alternative to filtering CommonCrawl. Our new corpus, called EusCrawl, is similar in size to the Basque portion of popular multilingual corpora like CC100 and mC4, yet it has a much higher quality according to native annotators. For instance, 66% of documents are rated as high-quality for EusCrawl, in contrast with <33% for both mC4 and CC100. Nevertheless, we obtain similar results on downstream NLU tasks regardless of the corpus used for pre-training. Our work suggests that NLU performance in low-resource languages is not primarily constrained by the quality of the data, and other factors like corpus size and domain coverage can play a more important role.

Large, curated, web-crawled corpora play a vital role in training language models (LMs). They form the lion's share of the training data in virtually all recent LMs, such as the well-known GPT, LLaMA and XLM-RoBERTa models. However, despite this importance, relatively little attention has been given to the quality of these corpora. In this paper, we compare four of the currently most relevant large, web-crawled corpora (CC100, MaCoCu, mC4 and OSCAR) across eleven lower-resourced European languages. Our approach is two-fold: first, we perform an intrinsic evaluation by performing a human evaluation of the quality of samples taken from different corpora; then, we assess the practical impact of the qualitative differences by training specific LMs on each of the corpora and evaluating their performance on downstream tasks. We find that there are clear differences in quality of the corpora, with MaCoCu and OSCAR obtaining the best results. However, during the extrinsic evaluation, we actually find that the CC100 corpus achieves the highest scores. We conclude that, in our experiments, the quality of the web-crawled corpora does not seem to play a significant role when training LMs.

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.

In this paper, we present a prompting framework called LLMCS that leverages large language models, such as code-davinci-002 of GPT-3, to perform few-shot conversational query rewriting for conversational search. We explore three prompting methods to generate multiple query rewrites and hypothetical responses, and propose aggregating them into an integrated representation that can robustly represent the user's real contextual search intent. Experimental results on two conversational search datasets, including CAst-19 and CAsT-20, show that our approach achieves significant improvements in search effectiveness over existing baselines and manual rewrites. Notably, LLMCS can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art baselines by up to +5.9\% and +32.9\% w.r.t. NDCG@3 on CAsT-19 and CAsT-20, highlighting the vast potential of large language models for conversational search. Our code will be released at https://github.com/kyriemao/LLMCS.

Machine translation is highly sensitive to the size and quality of the training data, which has led to an increasing interest in collecting and filtering large parallel corpora. In this paper, we propose a new method for this task based on multilingual sentence embeddings. In contrast to previous approaches, which rely on nearest neighbor retrieval with a hard threshold over cosine similarity, our proposed method accounts for the scale inconsistencies of this measure, considering the margin between a given sentence pair and its closest candidates instead. Our experiments show large improvements over existing methods. We outperform the best published results on the BUCC mining task and the UN reconstruction task by more than 10 F1 and 30 precision points, respectively. Filtering the English-German ParaCrawl corpus with our approach, we obtain 31.2 BLEU points on newstest2014, an improvement of more than one point over the best official filtered version.

This work aims to build a text embedder that can capture characteristics of texts specified by user instructions. Despite its tremendous potential to deploy user-oriented embeddings, none of previous approaches provides a concrete solution for it. This paper offers a new viewpoint, which treats the instruction as a question about the input text and encodes the expected answers to obtain the representation accordingly. Intuitively, texts with the same (implicit) semantics would share similar answers following the instruction, thus leading to more similar embeddings. Specifically, we propose InBedder that instantiates this embed-via-answering idea by only fine-tuning language models on abstractive question answering tasks. InBedder demonstrates significantly improved instruction-following capabilities according to our proposed instruction awareness tests and instruction robustness tests, when applied to both large language models (LLMs) (e.g., llama-2-7b) and smaller encoder-based LMs (e.g., roberta-large). Additionally, our qualitative analysis of clustering outcomes, achieved by applying different instructions to the same corpus, demonstrates a high degree of interpretability.

We present Prompt Cache, an approach for accelerating inference for large language models (LLM) by reusing attention states across different LLM prompts. Many input prompts have overlapping text segments, such as system messages, prompt templates, and documents provided for context. Our key insight is that by precomputing and storing the attention states of these frequently occurring text segments on the inference server, we can efficiently reuse them when these segments appear in user prompts. Prompt Cache employs a schema to explicitly define such reusable text segments, called prompt modules. The schema ensures positional accuracy during attention state reuse and provides users with an interface to access cached states in their prompt. Using a prototype implementation, we evaluate Prompt Cache across several LLMs. We show that Prompt Cache significantly reduce latency in time-to-first-token, especially for longer prompts such as document-based question answering and recommendations. The improvements range from 8x for GPU-based inference to 60x for CPU-based inference, all while maintaining output accuracy and without the need for model parameter modifications.

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.

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

The impressive progress in NLP techniques has been driven by the development of multi-task benchmarks such as GLUE and SuperGLUE. While these benchmarks focus on tasks for one or two input sentences, there has been exciting work in designing efficient techniques for processing much longer inputs. In this paper, we present MuLD: a new long document benchmark consisting of only documents over 10,000 tokens. By modifying existing NLP tasks, we create a diverse benchmark which requires models to successfully model long-term dependencies in the text. We evaluate how existing models perform, and find that our benchmark is much more challenging than their `short document' equivalents. Furthermore, by evaluating both regular and efficient transformers, we show that models with increased context length are better able to solve the tasks presented, suggesting that future improvements in these models are vital for solving similar long document problems. We release the data and code for baselines to encourage further research on efficient NLP models.

Recent machine translation algorithms mainly rely on parallel corpora. However, since the availability of parallel corpora remains limited, only some resource-rich language pairs can benefit from them. We constructed a parallel corpus for English-Japanese, for which the amount of publicly available parallel corpora is still limited. We constructed the parallel corpus by broadly crawling the web and automatically aligning parallel sentences. Our collected corpus, called JParaCrawl, amassed over 8.7 million sentence pairs. We show how it includes a broader range of domains and how a neural machine translation model trained with it works as a good pre-trained model for fine-tuning specific domains. The pre-training and fine-tuning approaches achieved or surpassed performance comparable to model training from the initial state and reduced the training time. Additionally, we trained the model with an in-domain dataset and JParaCrawl to show how we achieved the best performance with them. JParaCrawl and the pre-trained models are freely available online for research purposes.

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

We present bgGLUE(Bulgarian General Language Understanding Evaluation), a benchmark for evaluating language models on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks in Bulgarian. Our benchmark includes NLU tasks targeting a variety of NLP problems (e.g., natural language inference, fact-checking, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, question answering, etc.) and machine learning tasks (sequence labeling, document-level classification, and regression). We run the first systematic evaluation of pre-trained language models for Bulgarian, comparing and contrasting results across the nine tasks in the benchmark. The evaluation results show strong performance on sequence labeling tasks, but there is a lot of room for improvement for tasks that require more complex reasoning. We make bgGLUE publicly available together with the fine-tuning and the evaluation code, as well as a public leaderboard at https://bgglue.github.io/, and we hope that it will enable further advancements in developing NLU models for Bulgarian.

Forecasting future events is important for policy and decision making. In this work, we study whether language models (LMs) can forecast at the level of competitive human forecasters. Towards this goal, we develop a retrieval-augmented LM system designed to automatically search for relevant information, generate forecasts, and aggregate predictions. To facilitate our study, we collect a large dataset of questions from competitive forecasting platforms. Under a test set published after the knowledge cut-offs of our LMs, we evaluate the end-to-end performance of our system against the aggregates of human forecasts. On average, the system nears the crowd aggregate of competitive forecasters, and in some settings surpasses it. Our work suggests that using LMs to forecast the future could provide accurate predictions at scale and help to inform institutional decision making.

We present SemEval-2025 Task 5: LLMs4Subjects, a shared task on automated subject tagging for scientific and technical records in English and German using the GND taxonomy. Participants developed LLM-based systems to recommend top-k subjects, evaluated through quantitative metrics (precision, recall, F1-score) and qualitative assessments by subject specialists. Results highlight the effectiveness of LLM ensembles, synthetic data generation, and multilingual processing, offering insights into applying LLMs for digital library classification.

Did you try out the new Bing Search? Or maybe you fiddled around with Google AI~Overviews? These might sound familiar because the modern-day search stack has recently evolved to include retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. They allow searching and incorporating real-time data into large language models (LLMs) to provide a well-informed, attributed, concise summary in contrast to the traditional search paradigm that relies on displaying a ranked list of documents. Therefore, given these recent advancements, it is crucial to have an arena to build, test, visualize, and systematically evaluate RAG-based search systems. With this in mind, we propose the TREC 2024 RAG Track to foster innovation in evaluating RAG systems. In our work, we lay out the steps we've made towards making this track a reality -- we describe the details of our reusable framework, Ragnar\"ok, explain the curation of the new MS MARCO V2.1 collection choice, release the development topics for the track, and standardize the I/O definitions which assist the end user. Next, using Ragnar\"ok, we identify and provide key industrial baselines such as OpenAI's GPT-4o or Cohere's Command R+. Further, we introduce a web-based user interface for an interactive arena allowing benchmarking pairwise RAG systems by crowdsourcing. We open-source our Ragnar\"ok framework and baselines to achieve a unified standard for future RAG systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have drawn a lot of attention due to their strong performance on a wide range of natural language tasks, since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. LLMs' ability of general-purpose language understanding and generation is acquired by training billions of model's parameters on massive amounts of text data, as predicted by scaling laws kaplan2020scaling,hoffmann2022training. The research area of LLMs, while very recent, is evolving rapidly in many different ways. In this paper, we review some of the most prominent LLMs, including three popular LLM families (GPT, LLaMA, PaLM), and discuss their characteristics, contributions and limitations. We also give an overview of techniques developed to build, and augment LLMs. We then survey popular datasets prepared for LLM training, fine-tuning, and evaluation, review widely used LLM evaluation metrics, and compare the performance of several popular LLMs on a set of representative benchmarks. Finally, we conclude the paper by discussing open challenges and future research directions.

Challenging problems such as open-domain question answering, fact checking, slot filling and entity linking require access to large, external knowledge sources. While some models do well on individual tasks, developing general models is difficult as each task might require computationally expensive indexing of custom knowledge sources, in addition to dedicated infrastructure. To catalyze research on models that condition on specific information in large textual resources, we present a benchmark for knowledge-intensive language tasks (KILT). All tasks in KILT are grounded in the same snapshot of Wikipedia, reducing engineering turnaround through the re-use of components, as well as accelerating research into task-agnostic memory architectures. We test both task-specific and general baselines, evaluating downstream performance in addition to the ability of the models to provide provenance. We find that a shared dense vector index coupled with a seq2seq model is a strong baseline, outperforming more tailor-made approaches for fact checking, open-domain question answering and dialogue, and yielding competitive results on entity linking and slot filling, by generating disambiguated text. KILT data and code are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/KILT.

Many NLP researchers are experiencing an existential crisis triggered by the astonishing success of ChatGPT and other systems based on large language models (LLMs). After such a disruptive change to our understanding of the field, what is left to do? Taking a historical lens, we look for guidance from the first era of LLMs, which began in 2005 with large n-gram models for machine translation. We identify durable lessons from the first era, and more importantly, we identify evergreen problems where NLP researchers can continue to make meaningful contributions in areas where LLMs are ascendant. Among these lessons, we discuss the primacy of hardware advancement in shaping the availability and importance of scale, as well as the urgent challenge of quality evaluation, both automated and human. We argue that disparities in scale are transient and that researchers can work to reduce them; that data, rather than hardware, is still a bottleneck for many meaningful applications; that meaningful evaluation informed by actual use is still an open problem; and that there is still room for speculative approaches.

We show that margin-based bitext mining in a multilingual sentence space can be applied to monolingual corpora of billions of sentences. We are using ten snapshots of a curated common crawl corpus (Wenzek et al., 2019) totalling 32.7 billion unique sentences. Using one unified approach for 38 languages, we were able to mine 4.5 billions parallel sentences, out of which 661 million are aligned with English. 20 language pairs have more then 30 million parallel sentences, 112 more then 10 million, and most more than one million, including direct alignments between many European or Asian languages. To evaluate the quality of the mined bitexts, we train NMT systems for most of the language pairs and evaluate them on TED, WMT and WAT test sets. Using our mined bitexts only and no human translated parallel data, we achieve a new state-of-the-art for a single system on the WMT'19 test set for translation between English and German, Russian and Chinese, as well as German/French. In particular, our English/German system outperforms the best single one by close to 4 BLEU points and is almost on pair with best WMT'19 evaluation system which uses system combination and back-translation. We also achieve excellent results for distant languages pairs like Russian/Japanese, outperforming the best submission at the 2019 workshop on Asian Translation (WAT).

We present the ongoing NorLM initiative to support the creation and use of very large contextualised language models for Norwegian (and in principle other Nordic languages), including a ready-to-use software environment, as well as an experience report for data preparation and training. This paper introduces the first large-scale monolingual language models for Norwegian, based on both the ELMo and BERT frameworks. In addition to detailing the training process, we present contrastive benchmark results on a suite of NLP tasks for Norwegian. For additional background and access to the data, models, and software, please see http://norlm.nlpl.eu

Multilingual Large Language Models are capable of using powerful Large Language Models to handle and respond to queries in multiple languages, which achieves remarkable success in multilingual natural language processing tasks. Despite these breakthroughs, there still remains a lack of a comprehensive survey to summarize existing approaches and recent developments in this field. To this end, in this paper, we present a thorough review and provide a unified perspective to summarize the recent progress as well as emerging trends in multilingual large language models (MLLMs) literature. The contributions of this paper can be summarized: (1) First survey: to our knowledge, we take the first step and present a thorough review in MLLMs research field according to multi-lingual alignment; (2) New taxonomy: we offer a new and unified perspective to summarize the current progress of MLLMs; (3) New frontiers: we highlight several emerging frontiers and discuss the corresponding challenges; (4) Abundant resources: we collect abundant open-source resources, including relevant papers, data corpora, and leaderboards. We hope our work can provide the community with quick access and spur breakthrough research in MLLMs.

We present the Charles University system for the MRL~2023 Shared Task on Multi-lingual Multi-task Information Retrieval. The goal of the shared task was to develop systems for named entity recognition and question answering in several under-represented languages. Our solutions to both subtasks rely on the translate-test approach. We first translate the unlabeled examples into English using a multilingual machine translation model. Then, we run inference on the translated data using a strong task-specific model. Finally, we project the labeled data back into the original language. To keep the inferred tags on the correct positions in the original language, we propose a method based on scoring the candidate positions using a label-sensitive translation model. In both settings, we experiment with finetuning the classification models on the translated data. However, due to a domain mismatch between the development data and the shared task validation and test sets, the finetuned models could not outperform our baselines.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for a sentence-level answer-selection task that is a fundamental problem in natural language processing. First, we explore the effect of additional information by adopting a pretrained language model to compute the vector representation of the input text and by applying transfer learning from a large-scale corpus. Second, we enhance the compare-aggregate model by proposing a novel latent clustering method to compute additional information within the target corpus and by changing the objective function from listwise to pointwise. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches, experiments are performed with the WikiQA and TREC-QA datasets. The empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach, which achieve state-of-the-art performance for both datasets.

This paper describes our submission to CoNLL 2018 UD Shared Task. We have extended an LSTM-based neural network designed for sequence tagging to additionally generate character-level sequences. The network was jointly trained to produce lemmas, part-of-speech tags and morphological features. Sentence segmentation, tokenization and dependency parsing were handled by UDPipe 1.2 baseline. The results demonstrate the viability of the proposed multitask architecture, although its performance still remains far from state-of-the-art.

Remarkable advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled high-quality text summarization. However, this capability is currently accessible only through LLMs of substantial size or proprietary LLMs with usage fees. In response, smaller-scale LLMs (sLLMs) of easy accessibility and low costs have been extensively studied, yet they often suffer from missing key information and entities, i.e., low relevance, in particular, when input documents are long. We hence propose a key-element-informed instruction tuning for summarization, so-called KEITSum, which identifies key elements in documents and instructs sLLM to generate summaries capturing these key elements. Experimental results on dialogue and news datasets demonstrate that sLLM with KEITSum indeed provides high-quality summarization with higher relevance and less hallucinations, competitive to proprietary LLM.

We present Bloom Library, a linguistically diverse set of multimodal and multilingual datasets for language modeling, image captioning, visual storytelling, and speech synthesis/recognition. These datasets represent either the most, or among the most, multilingual datasets for each of the included downstream tasks. In total, the initial release of the Bloom Library datasets covers 363 languages across 32 language families. We train downstream task models for various languages represented in the data, showing the viability of the data for future work in low-resource, multimodal NLP and establishing the first known baselines for these downstream tasks in certain languages (e.g., Bisu [bzi], with an estimated population of 700 users). Some of these first-of-their-kind baselines are comparable to state-of-the-art performance for higher-resourced languages. The Bloom Library datasets are released under Creative Commons licenses on the Hugging Face datasets hub to catalyze more linguistically diverse research in the included downstream tasks.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems have been applied in a range of domains to support human users to achieve specific goals. Systems are typically constructed for a single domain or language and do not generalise well beyond this. Their extension to other languages in particular is restricted by the lack of available training data for many of the world's languages. To support work on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in TOD across multiple languages and domains simultaneously, we constructed MULTI3NLU++, a multilingual, multi-intent, multi-domain dataset. MULTI3NLU++ extends the English-only NLU++ dataset to include manual translations into a range of high, medium and low resource languages (Spanish, Marathi, Turkish and Amharic), in two domains (banking and hotels). MULTI3NLU++ inherits the multi-intent property of NLU++, where an utterance may be labelled with multiple intents, providing a more realistic representation of a user's goals and aligning with the more complex tasks that commercial systems aim to model. We use MULTI3NLU++ to benchmark state-of-the-art multilingual language models as well as Machine Translation and Question Answering systems for the NLU task of intent detection for TOD systems in the multilingual setting. The results demonstrate the challenging nature of the dataset, particularly in the low-resource language setting.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has enabled significant performance gains in the field of natural language processing. However, recent studies have found that LLMs often resort to shortcuts when performing tasks, creating an illusion of enhanced performance while lacking generalizability in their decision rules. This phenomenon introduces challenges in accurately assessing natural language understanding in LLMs. Our paper provides a concise survey of relevant research in this area and puts forth a perspective on the implications of shortcut learning in the evaluation of language models, specifically for NLU tasks. This paper urges more research efforts to be put towards deepening our comprehension of shortcut learning, contributing to the development of more robust language models, and raising the standards of NLU evaluation in real-world scenarios.

HC4 is a new suite of test collections for ad hoc Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), with Common Crawl News documents in Chinese, Persian, and Russian, topics in English and in the document languages, and graded relevance judgments. New test collections are needed because existing CLIR test collections built using pooling of traditional CLIR runs have systematic gaps in their relevance judgments when used to evaluate neural CLIR methods. The HC4 collections contain 60 topics and about half a million documents for each of Chinese and Persian, and 54 topics and five million documents for Russian. Active learning was used to determine which documents to annotate after being seeded using interactive search and judgment. Documents were judged on a three-grade relevance scale. This paper describes the design and construction of the new test collections and provides baseline results for demonstrating their utility for evaluating systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs)' search capabilities have garnered significant attention. Existing benchmarks, such as OpenAI's BrowseComp, primarily focus on general search scenarios and fail to adequately address the specific demands of academic search. These demands include deeper literature tracing and organization, professional support for academic databases, the ability to navigate long-tail academic knowledge, and ensuring academic rigor. Here, we proposed ScholarSearch, the first dataset specifically designed to evaluate the complex information retrieval capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in academic research. ScholarSearch possesses the following key characteristics: Academic Practicality, where question content closely mirrors real academic learning and research environments, avoiding deliberately misleading models; High Difficulty, with answers that are challenging for single models (e.g., Grok DeepSearch or Gemini Deep Research) to provide directly, often requiring at least three deep searches to derive; Concise Evaluation, where limiting conditions ensure answers are as unique as possible, accompanied by clear sources and brief solution explanations, greatly facilitating subsequent audit and verification, surpassing the current lack of analyzed search datasets both domestically and internationally; and Broad Coverage, as the dataset spans at least 15 different academic disciplines. Through ScholarSearch, we expect to more precisely measure and promote the performance improvement of LLMs in complex academic information retrieval tasks. The data is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/PKU-DS-LAB/ScholarSearch

Scientific paper retrieval is essential for supporting literature discovery and research. While dense retrieval methods demonstrate effectiveness in general-purpose tasks, they often fail to capture fine-grained scientific concepts that are essential for accurate understanding of scientific queries. Recent studies also use large language models (LLMs) for query understanding; however, these methods often lack grounding in corpus-specific knowledge and may generate unreliable or unfaithful content. To overcome these limitations, we propose SemRank, an effective and efficient paper retrieval framework that combines LLM-guided query understanding with a concept-based semantic index. Each paper is indexed using multi-granular scientific concepts, including general research topics and detailed key phrases. At query time, an LLM identifies core concepts derived from the corpus to explicitly capture the query's information need. These identified concepts enable precise semantic matching, significantly enhancing retrieval accuracy. Experiments show that SemRank consistently improves the performance of various base retrievers, surpasses strong existing LLM-based baselines, and remains highly efficient.

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.

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) aims to extract the semantics frame of user queries, which is a core component in a task-oriented dialog system. With the burst of deep neural networks and the evolution of pre-trained language models, the research of SLU has obtained significant breakthroughs. However, there remains a lack of a comprehensive survey summarizing existing approaches and recent trends, which motivated the work presented in this article. In this paper, we survey recent advances and new frontiers in SLU. Specifically, we give a thorough review of this research field, covering different aspects including (1) new taxonomy: we provide a new perspective for SLU filed, including single model vs. joint model, implicit joint modeling vs. explicit joint modeling in joint model, non pre-trained paradigm vs. pre-trained paradigm;(2) new frontiers: some emerging areas in complex SLU as well as the corresponding challenges; (3) abundant open-source resources: to help the community, we have collected, organized the related papers, baseline projects and leaderboard on a public website where SLU researchers could directly access to the recent progress. We hope that this survey can shed a light on future research in SLU field.

Text embedding has become a foundational technology in natural language processing (NLP) during the deep learning era, driving advancements across a wide array of downstream tasks. While many natural language understanding challenges can now be modeled using generative paradigms and leverage the robust generative and comprehension capabilities of large language models (LLMs), numerous practical applications, such as semantic matching, clustering, and information retrieval, continue to rely on text embeddings for their efficiency and effectiveness. In this survey, we categorize the interplay between LLMs and text embeddings into three overarching themes: (1) LLM-augmented text embedding, enhancing traditional embedding methods with LLMs; (2) LLMs as text embedders, utilizing their innate capabilities for embedding generation; and (3) Text embedding understanding with LLMs, leveraging LLMs to analyze and interpret embeddings. By organizing these efforts based on interaction patterns rather than specific downstream applications, we offer a novel and systematic overview of contributions from various research and application domains in the era of LLMs. Furthermore, we highlight the unresolved challenges that persisted in the pre-LLM era with pre-trained language models (PLMs) and explore the emerging obstacles brought forth by LLMs. Building on this analysis, we outline prospective directions for the evolution of text embedding, addressing both theoretical and practical opportunities in the rapidly advancing landscape of NLP.

Current literature, aiming to surpass the "Chain-of-Thought" approach, often resorts to an external modus operandi involving halting, modifying, and then resuming the generation process to boost Large Language Models' (LLMs) reasoning capacities. This mode escalates the number of query requests, leading to increased costs, memory, and computational overheads. Addressing this, we propose the Algorithm of Thoughts -- a novel strategy that propels LLMs through algorithmic reasoning pathways, pioneering a new mode of in-context learning. By employing algorithmic examples, we exploit the innate recurrence dynamics of LLMs, expanding their idea exploration with merely one or a few queries. Our technique outperforms earlier single-query methods and stands on par with a recent multi-query strategy that employs an extensive tree search algorithm. Intriguingly, our results suggest that instructing an LLM using an algorithm can lead to performance surpassing that of the algorithm itself, hinting at LLM's inherent ability to weave its intuition into optimized searches. We probe into the underpinnings of our method's efficacy and its nuances in application.

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.

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.

We present the Claire French Dialogue Dataset (CFDD), a resource created by members of LINAGORA Labs in the context of the OpenLLM France initiative. CFDD is a corpus containing roughly 160 million words from transcripts and stage plays in French that we have assembled and publicly released in an effort to further the development of multilingual, open source language models. This paper describes the 24 individual corpora of which CFDD is composed and provides links and citations to their original sources. It also provides our proposed breakdown of the full CFDD dataset into eight categories of subcorpora and describes the process we followed to standardize the format of the final dataset. We conclude with a discussion of similar work and future directions.

The remarkable capability of large language models (LLMs) for in-context learning (ICL) needs to be activated by demonstration examples. Prior work has extensively explored the selection of examples for ICL, predominantly following the "select then organize" paradigm, such approaches often neglect the internal relationships between examples and exist an inconsistency between the training and inference. In this paper, we formulate the problem as a sequential selection problem and introduce Se^2, a sequential-aware method that leverages the LLM's feedback on varying context, aiding in capturing inter-relationships and sequential information among examples, significantly enriching the contextuality and relevance of ICL prompts. Meanwhile, we utilize beam search to seek and construct example sequences, enhancing both quality and diversity. Extensive experiments across 23 NLP tasks from 8 distinct categories illustrate that Se^2 markedly surpasses competitive baselines and achieves 42% relative improvement over random selection. Further in-depth analysis show the effectiveness of proposed strategies, highlighting Se^2's exceptional stability and adaptability across various scenarios. Our code will be released to facilitate future research.

We present the results and the main findings of SemEval-2024 Task 8: Multigenerator, Multidomain, and Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection. The task featured three subtasks. Subtask A is a binary classification task determining whether a text is written by a human or generated by a machine. This subtask has two tracks: a monolingual track focused solely on English texts and a multilingual track. Subtask B is to detect the exact source of a text, discerning whether it is written by a human or generated by a specific LLM. Subtask C aims to identify the changing point within a text, at which the authorship transitions from human to machine. The task attracted a large number of participants: subtask A monolingual (126), subtask A multilingual (59), subtask B (70), and subtask C (30). In this paper, we present the task, analyze the results, and discuss the system submissions and the methods they used. For all subtasks, the best systems used LLMs.

Tasks involving text generation based on multiple input texts, such as multi-document summarization, long-form question answering and contemporary dialogue applications, challenge models for their ability to properly consolidate partly-overlapping multi-text information. However, these tasks entangle the consolidation phase with the often subjective and ill-defined content selection requirement, impeding proper assessment of models' consolidation capabilities. In this paper, we suggest revisiting the sentence union generation task as an effective well-defined testbed for assessing text consolidation capabilities, decoupling the consolidation challenge from subjective content selection. To support research on this task, we present refined annotation methodology and tools for crowdsourcing sentence union, create the largest union dataset to date and provide an analysis of its rich coverage of various consolidation aspects. We then propose a comprehensive evaluation protocol for union generation, including both human and automatic evaluation. Finally, as baselines, we evaluate state-of-the-art language models on the task, along with a detailed analysis of their capacity to address multi-text consolidation challenges and their limitations.

There is a rapidly growing number of open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) and benchmark datasets to compare them. While some models dominate these benchmarks, no single model typically achieves the best accuracy in all tasks and use cases. In this work, we address the challenge of selecting the best LLM out of a collection of models for new tasks. We propose a new formulation for the problem, in which benchmark datasets are repurposed to learn a "router" model for this LLM selection, and we show that this problem can be reduced to a collection of binary classification tasks. We demonstrate the utility and limitations of learning model routers from various benchmark datasets, where we consistently improve performance upon using any single model for all tasks.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on many different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Prompt engineering plays a key role in adding more to the already existing abilities of LLMs to achieve significant performance gains on various NLP tasks. Prompt engineering requires composing natural language instructions called prompts to elicit knowledge from LLMs in a structured way. Unlike previous state-of-the-art (SoTA) models, prompt engineering does not require extensive parameter re-training or fine-tuning based on the given NLP task and thus solely operates on the embedded knowledge of LLMs. Additionally, LLM enthusiasts can intelligently extract LLMs' knowledge through a basic natural language conversational exchange or prompt engineering, allowing more and more people even without deep mathematical machine learning background to experiment with LLMs. With prompt engineering gaining popularity in the last two years, researchers have come up with numerous engineering techniques around designing prompts to improve accuracy of information extraction from the LLMs. In this paper, we summarize different prompting techniques and club them together based on different NLP tasks that they have been used for. We further granularly highlight the performance of these prompting strategies on various datasets belonging to that NLP task, talk about the corresponding LLMs used, present a taxonomy diagram and discuss the possible SoTA for specific datasets. In total, we read and present a survey of 44 research papers which talk about 39 different prompting methods on 29 different NLP tasks of which most of them have been published in the last two years.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) faces challenges related to factual correctness, source attribution, and response completeness. The LiveRAG Challenge hosted at SIGIR'25 aims to advance RAG research using a fixed corpus and a shared, open-source LLM. We propose a modular pipeline that operates on information nuggets-minimal, atomic units of relevant information extracted from retrieved documents. This multistage pipeline encompasses query rewriting, passage retrieval and reranking, nugget detection and clustering, cluster ranking and summarization, and response fluency enhancement. This design inherently promotes grounding in specific facts, facilitates source attribution, and ensures maximum information inclusion within length constraints. In this challenge, we extend our focus to also address the retrieval component of RAG, building upon our prior work on multi-faceted query rewriting. Furthermore, for augmented generation, we concentrate on improving context curation capabilities, maximizing the breadth of information covered in the response while ensuring pipeline efficiency. Our results show that combining original queries with a few sub-query rewrites boosts recall, while increasing the number of documents used for reranking and generation beyond a certain point reduces effectiveness, without improving response quality.

Recent Long-Context Language Models (LCLMs) can process hundreds of thousands of tokens in a single prompt, enabling new opportunities for knowledge-intensive multi-hop reasoning by integrating large sets of retrieved documents or, in some cases, directly all necessary information. However, simply feeding more documents into the context window fails to capture how evidence should be connected. We address this gap with thought templates, which recast reasoning as reusable thought caches, derived from prior problem solving traces, structuring how evidence is combined and guiding multi-hop inference with factual documents. To keep these templates effective, we propose an update strategy that iteratively refines templates derived from training data through natural-language feedback. Across diverse benchmarks and LCLM families, our approach delivers consistent gains over strong baselines in both retrieval-based and retrieval-free settings. Furthermore, we show that optimized templates can be distilled into smaller open-source models, demonstrating its broad applicability and transparent reasoning reuse. We refer to our framework as Thought Template Augmented LCLMs (ToTAL).

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has enabled the deployment of many generative NLP applications. At the same time, it has also led to a misleading public discourse that ``it's all been solved.'' Not surprisingly, this has, in turn, made many NLP researchers -- especially those at the beginning of their careers -- worry about what NLP research area they should focus on. Has it all been solved, or what remaining questions can we work on regardless of LLMs? To address this question, this paper compiles NLP research directions rich for exploration. We identify fourteen different research areas encompassing 45 research directions that require new research and are not directly solvable by LLMs. While we identify many research areas, many others exist; we do not cover areas currently addressed by LLMs, but where LLMs lag behind in performance or those focused on LLM development. We welcome suggestions for other research directions to include: https://bit.ly/nlp-era-llm

Large Language Models (LLMs) play powerful, black-box readers in the retrieve-then-read pipeline, making remarkable progress in knowledge-intensive tasks. This work introduces a new framework, Rewrite-Retrieve-Read instead of the previous retrieve-then-read for the retrieval-augmented LLMs from the perspective of the query rewriting. Unlike prior studies focusing on adapting either the retriever or the reader, our approach pays attention to the adaptation of the search query itself, for there is inevitably a gap between the input text and the needed knowledge in retrieval. We first prompt an LLM to generate the query, then use a web search engine to retrieve contexts. Furthermore, to better align the query to the frozen modules, we propose a trainable scheme for our pipeline. A small language model is adopted as a trainable rewriter to cater to the black-box LLM reader. The rewriter is trained using the feedback of the LLM reader by reinforcement learning. Evaluation is conducted on downstream tasks, open-domain QA and multiple-choice QA. Experiments results show consistent performance improvement, indicating that our framework is proven effective and scalable, and brings a new framework for retrieval-augmented LLM.

There is a rapidly growing number of large language models (LLMs) that users can query for a fee. We review the cost associated with querying popular LLM APIs, e.g. GPT-4, ChatGPT, J1-Jumbo, and find that these models have heterogeneous pricing structures, with fees that can differ by two orders of magnitude. In particular, using LLMs on large collections of queries and text can be expensive. Motivated by this, we outline and discuss three types of strategies that users can exploit to reduce the inference cost associated with using LLMs: 1) prompt adaptation, 2) LLM approximation, and 3) LLM cascade. As an example, we propose FrugalGPT, a simple yet flexible instantiation of LLM cascade which learns which combinations of LLMs to use for different queries in order to reduce cost and improve accuracy. Our experiments show that FrugalGPT can match the performance of the best individual LLM (e.g. GPT-4) with up to 98% cost reduction or improve the accuracy over GPT-4 by 4% with the same cost. The ideas and findings presented here lay a foundation for using LLMs sustainably and efficiently.

To address the need for a more comprehensive evaluation of French Natural Language Understanding (NLU), we introduce COLE, a new benchmark composed of 23 diverse task covering a broad range of NLU capabilities, including sentiment analysis, paraphrase detection, grammatical judgment, and reasoning, with a particular focus on linguistic phenomena relevant to the French language. We benchmark 94 large language models (LLM), providing an extensive analysis of the current state of French NLU. Our results highlight a significant performance gap between closed- and open-weights models and identify key challenging frontiers for current LLMs, such as zero-shot extractive question-answering (QA), fine-grained word sense disambiguation, and understanding of regional language variations. We release COLE as a public resource to foster further progress in French language modelling.

We introduce a multi-task setup of identifying and classifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles. We create SciERC, a dataset that includes annotations for all three tasks and develop a unified framework called Scientific Information Extractor (SciIE) for with shared span representations. The multi-task setup reduces cascading errors between tasks and leverages cross-sentence relations through coreference links. Experiments show that our multi-task model outperforms previous models in scientific information extraction without using any domain-specific features. We further show that the framework supports construction of a scientific knowledge graph, which we use to analyze information in scientific literature.

Retrieval-augmented large language models (R-LLMs) combine pre-trained large language models (LLMs) with information retrieval systems to improve the accuracy of factual question-answering. However, current libraries for building R-LLMs provide high-level abstractions without sufficient transparency for evaluating and optimizing prompts within specific inference processes such as retrieval and generation. To address this gap, we present RaLLe, an open-source framework designed to facilitate the development, evaluation, and optimization of R-LLMs for knowledge-intensive tasks. With RaLLe, developers can easily develop and evaluate R-LLMs, improving hand-crafted prompts, assessing individual inference processes, and objectively measuring overall system performance quantitatively. By leveraging these features, developers can enhance the performance and accuracy of their R-LLMs in knowledge-intensive generation tasks. We open-source our code at https://github.com/yhoshi3/RaLLe.

This paper studies fast fusion of dense retrieval and sparse lexical retrieval, and proposes a cluster-based selective dense retrieval method called CluSD guided by sparse lexical retrieval. CluSD takes a lightweight cluster-based approach and exploits the overlap of sparse retrieval results and embedding clusters in a two-stage selection process with an LSTM model to quickly identify relevant clusters while incurring limited extra memory space overhead. CluSD triggers partial dense retrieval and performs cluster-based block disk I/O if needed. This paper evaluates CluSD and compares it with several baselines for searching in-memory and on-disk MS MARCO and BEIR datasets.

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.

While fine-tuned language models perform well on many tasks, they were also shown to rely on superficial surface features such as lexical overlap. Excessive utilization of such heuristics can lead to failure on challenging inputs. We analyze the use of lexical overlap heuristics in natural language inference, paraphrase detection, and reading comprehension (using a novel contrastive dataset), and find that larger models are much less susceptible to adopting lexical overlap heuristics. We also find that longer training leads models to abandon lexical overlap heuristics. Finally, we provide evidence that the disparity between models size has its source in the pre-trained model

There is growing interest in searching for information from large video corpora. Prior works have studied relevant tasks, such as text-based video retrieval, moment retrieval, video summarization, and video captioning in isolation, without an end-to-end setup that can jointly search from video corpora and generate summaries. Such an end-to-end setup would allow for many interesting applications, e.g., a text-based search that finds a relevant video from a video corpus, extracts the most relevant moment from that video, and segments the moment into important steps with captions. To address this, we present the HiREST (HIerarchical REtrieval and STep-captioning) dataset and propose a new benchmark that covers hierarchical information retrieval and visual/textual stepwise summarization from an instructional video corpus. HiREST consists of 3.4K text-video pairs from an instructional video dataset, where 1.1K videos have annotations of moment spans relevant to text query and breakdown of each moment into key instruction steps with caption and timestamps (totaling 8.6K step captions). Our hierarchical benchmark consists of video retrieval, moment retrieval, and two novel moment segmentation and step captioning tasks. In moment segmentation, models break down a video moment into instruction steps and identify start-end boundaries. In step captioning, models generate a textual summary for each step. We also present starting point task-specific and end-to-end joint baseline models for our new benchmark. While the baseline models show some promising results, there still exists large room for future improvement by the community. Project website: https://hirest-cvpr2023.github.io

Literature reviews are an essential component of scientific research, but they remain time-intensive and challenging to write, especially due to the recent influx of research papers. This paper explores the zero-shot abilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) in assisting with the writing of literature reviews based on an abstract. We decompose the task into two components: 1. Retrieving related works given a query abstract, and 2. Writing a literature review based on the retrieved results. We analyze how effective LLMs are for both components. For retrieval, we introduce a novel two-step search strategy that first uses an LLM to extract meaningful keywords from the abstract of a paper and then retrieves potentially relevant papers by querying an external knowledge base. Additionally, we study a prompting-based re-ranking mechanism with attribution and show that re-ranking doubles the normalized recall compared to naive search methods, while providing insights into the LLM's decision-making process. In the generation phase, we propose a two-step approach that first outlines a plan for the review and then executes steps in the plan to generate the actual review. To evaluate different LLM-based literature review methods, we create test sets from arXiv papers using a protocol designed for rolling use with newly released LLMs to avoid test set contamination in zero-shot evaluations. We release this evaluation protocol to promote additional research and development in this regard. Our empirical results suggest that LLMs show promising potential for writing literature reviews when the task is decomposed into smaller components of retrieval and planning. Our project page including a demonstration system and toolkit can be accessed here: https://litllm.github.io.

While recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven useful in answering user queries, they are prone to hallucination, and their responses often lack credibility due to missing references to reliable sources. An intuitive solution to these issues would be to include in-text citations referring to external documents as evidence. While previous works have directly prompted LLMs to generate in-text citations, their performances are far from satisfactory, especially when it comes to smaller LLMs. In this work, we propose an effective training framework using fine-grained rewards to teach LLMs to generate highly supportive and relevant citations, while ensuring the correctness of their responses. We also conduct a systematic analysis of applying these fine-grained rewards to common LLM training strategies, demonstrating its advantage over conventional practices. We conduct extensive experiments on Question Answering (QA) datasets taken from the ALCE benchmark and validate the model's generalizability using EXPERTQA. On LLaMA-2-7B, the incorporation of fine-grained rewards achieves the best performance among the baselines, even surpassing that of GPT-3.5-turbo.

It is expensive and difficult to obtain the large number of sentence-level intent and token-level slot label annotations required to train neural network (NN)-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) components of task-oriented dialog systems, especially for the many real world tasks that have a large and growing number of intents and slot types. While zero shot learning approaches that require no labeled examples -- only features and auxiliary information -- have been proposed only for slot labeling, we show that one can profitably perform joint zero-shot intent classification and slot labeling. We demonstrate the value of capturing dependencies between intents and slots, and between different slots in an utterance in the zero shot setting. We describe NN architectures that translate between word and sentence embedding spaces, and demonstrate that these modifications are required to enable zero shot learning for this task. We show a substantial improvement over strong baselines and explain the intuition behind each architectural modification through visualizations and ablation studies.

Recently, there has been a rapid advancement in research on Large Language Models (LLMs), resulting in significant progress in several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Consequently, there has been a surge in LLM evaluation research to comprehend the models' capabilities and limitations. However, much of this research has been confined to the English language, leaving LLM building and evaluation for non-English languages relatively unexplored. There has been an introduction of several new LLMs, necessitating their evaluation on non-English languages. This study aims to expand our MEGA benchmarking suite by including six new datasets to form the MEGAVERSE benchmark. The benchmark comprises 22 datasets covering 81 languages, including low-resource African languages. We evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT4, PaLM2, and Llama2 on the MEGAVERSE datasets. Additionally, we include two multimodal datasets in the benchmark and assess the performance of the LLaVa-v1.5 model. Our experiments suggest that GPT4 and PaLM2 outperform the Llama models on various tasks, notably on low-resource languages, with GPT4 outperforming PaLM2 on more datasets than vice versa. However, issues such as data contamination must be addressed to obtain an accurate assessment of LLM performance on non-English languages.

Modern NLP tasks increasingly rely on dense retrieval methods to access up-to-date and relevant contextual information. We are motivated by the premise that retrieval benefits from segments that can vary in size such that a content's semantic independence is better captured. We propose LumberChunker, a method leveraging an LLM to dynamically segment documents, which iteratively prompts the LLM to identify the point within a group of sequential passages where the content begins to shift. To evaluate our method, we introduce GutenQA, a benchmark with 3000 "needle in a haystack" type of question-answer pairs derived from 100 public domain narrative books available on Project Gutenberg. Our experiments show that LumberChunker not only outperforms the most competitive baseline by 7.37% in retrieval performance (DCG@20) but also that, when integrated into a RAG pipeline, LumberChunker proves to be more effective than other chunking methods and competitive baselines, such as the Gemini 1.5M Pro. Our Code and Data are available at https://github.com/joaodsmarques/LumberChunker

Multimodal LLMs are the natural evolution of LLMs, and enlarge their capabilities so as to work beyond the pure textual modality. As research is being carried out to design novel architectures and vision-and-language adapters, in this paper we concentrate on endowing such models with the capability of answering questions that require external knowledge. Our approach, termed Wiki-LLaVA, aims at integrating an external knowledge source of multimodal documents, which is accessed through a hierarchical retrieval pipeline. Relevant passages, using this approach, are retrieved from the external knowledge source and employed as additional context for the LLM, augmenting the effectiveness and precision of generated dialogues. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets tailored for visual question answering with external data and demonstrate the appropriateness of our approach.

Recently, dense passage retrieval has become a mainstream approach to finding relevant information in various natural language processing tasks. A number of studies have been devoted to improving the widely adopted dual-encoder architecture. However, most of the previous studies only consider query-centric similarity relation when learning the dual-encoder retriever. In order to capture more comprehensive similarity relations, we propose a novel approach that leverages both query-centric and PAssage-centric sImilarity Relations (called PAIR) for dense passage retrieval. To implement our approach, we make three major technical contributions by introducing formal formulations of the two kinds of similarity relations, generating high-quality pseudo labeled data via knowledge distillation, and designing an effective two-stage training procedure that incorporates passage-centric similarity relation constraint. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on both MSMARCO and Natural Questions datasets.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) often relies on large vector databases and cross-encoders tuned for large-scale corpora, which can be excessive for small, domain-specific collections. We present MODE (Mixture of Document Experts), a lightweight alternative that replaces fine-grained nearest-neighbor search with cluster-and-route retrieval. Documents are embedded, grouped into semantically coherent clusters, and represented by cached centroids. At query time, we route to the top centroid(s) and retrieve context only within those clusters, eliminating external vector-database infrastructure and reranking while keeping latency low. On HotpotQA and SQuAD corpora with 100-500 chunks, MODE matches or exceeds a dense-retrieval baseline in answer quality while reducing end-to-end retrieval time. Ablations show that cluster granularity and multi-cluster routing control the recall/precision trade-off, and that tighter clusters improve downstream accuracy. MODE offers a practical recipe for small and medium corpora where simplicity, speed, and topical focus matter.

Scientific literature understanding tasks have gained significant attention due to their potential to accelerate scientific discovery. Pre-trained language models (LMs) have shown effectiveness in these tasks, especially when tuned via contrastive learning. However, jointly utilizing pre-training data across multiple heterogeneous tasks (e.g., extreme classification, citation prediction, and literature search) remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-task contrastive learning framework, SciMult, with a focus on facilitating common knowledge sharing across different scientific literature understanding tasks while preventing task-specific skills from interfering with each other. To be specific, we explore two techniques -- task-aware specialization and instruction tuning. The former adopts a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer architecture with task-aware sub-layers; the latter prepends task-specific instructions to the input text so as to produce task-aware outputs. Extensive experiments on a comprehensive collection of benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our task-aware specialization strategy in various tasks, where we outperform state-of-the-art scientific LMs.

Instruction-tuned language models (LM) are able to respond to imperative commands, providing a more natural user interface compared to their base counterparts. In this work, we present Promptriever, the first retrieval model able to be prompted like an LM. To train Promptriever, we curate and release a new instance-level instruction training set from MS MARCO, spanning nearly 500k instances. Promptriever not only achieves strong performance on standard retrieval tasks, but also follows instructions. We observe: (1) large gains (reaching SoTA) on following detailed relevance instructions (+14.3 p-MRR / +3.1 nDCG on FollowIR), (2) significantly increased robustness to lexical choices/phrasing in the query+instruction (+12.9 Robustness@10 on InstructIR), and (3) the ability to perform hyperparameter search via prompting to reliably improve retrieval performance (+1.4 average increase on BEIR). Promptriever demonstrates that retrieval models can be controlled with prompts on a per-query basis, setting the stage for future work aligning LM prompting techniques with information retrieval.

While large language models (LLMs) are equipped with longer text input capabilities than before, they are struggling to seek correct information in long contexts. The "lost in the middle" problem challenges most LLMs, referring to the dramatic decline in accuracy when correct information is located in the middle. To overcome this crucial issue, this paper proposes to enhance the information searching and reflection ability of LLMs in long contexts via specially designed tasks called Attention Strengthening Multi-doc QA (ASM QA). Following these tasks, our model excels in focusing more precisely on the desired information. Experimental results show substantial improvement in Multi-doc QA and other benchmarks, superior to state-of-the-art models by 13.7% absolute gain in shuffled settings, by 21.5% in passage retrieval task. We release our model, Ziya-Reader to promote related research in the community.

We study prompting-based approaches with Large Language Models (LLMs) for modifying documents so as to promote their ranking in a competitive search setting. Our methods are inspired by prior work on leveraging LLMs as rankers. We evaluate our approach by deploying it as a bot in previous ranking competitions and in competitions we organized. Our findings demonstrate that our approach effectively improves document ranking while preserving high levels of faithfulness to the original content and maintaining overall document quality.

The current use of large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot document ranking follows one of two ways: 1) prompt-based re-ranking methods, which require no further training but are feasible for only re-ranking a handful of candidate documents due to the associated computational costs; and 2) unsupervised contrastive trained dense retrieval methods, which can retrieve relevant documents from the entire corpus but require a large amount of paired text data for contrastive training. In this paper, we propose PromptReps, which combines the advantages of both categories: no need for training and the ability to retrieve from the whole corpus. Our method only requires prompts to guide an LLM to generate query and document representations for effective document retrieval. Specifically, we prompt the LLMs to represent a given text using a single word, and then use the last token's hidden states and the corresponding logits associated to the prediction of the next token to construct a hybrid document retrieval system. The retrieval system harnesses both dense text embedding and sparse bag-of-words representations given by the LLM. Our experimental evaluation on the BEIR zero-shot document retrieval datasets illustrates that this simple prompt-based LLM retrieval method can achieve a similar or higher retrieval effectiveness than state-of-the-art LLM embedding methods that are trained with large amounts of unsupervised data, especially when using a larger LLM.

Despite the critical need to align search targets with users' intention, retrievers often only prioritize query information without delving into the users' intended search context. Enhancing the capability of retrievers to understand intentions and preferences of users, akin to language model instructions, has the potential to yield more aligned search targets. Prior studies restrict the application of instructions in information retrieval to a task description format, neglecting the broader context of diverse and evolving search scenarios. Furthermore, the prevailing benchmarks utilized for evaluation lack explicit tailoring to assess instruction-following ability, thereby hindering progress in this field. In response to these limitations, we propose a novel benchmark,INSTRUCTIR, specifically designed to evaluate instruction-following ability in information retrieval tasks. Our approach focuses on user-aligned instructions tailored to each query instance, reflecting the diverse characteristics inherent in real-world search scenarios. Through experimental analysis, we observe that retrievers fine-tuned to follow task-style instructions, such as INSTRUCTOR, can underperform compared to their non-instruction-tuned counterparts. This underscores potential overfitting issues inherent in constructing retrievers trained on existing instruction-aware retrieval datasets.

Natural language understanding (NLU) is integral to various social media applications. However, existing NLU models rely heavily on context for semantic learning, resulting in compromised performance when faced with short and noisy social media content. To address this issue, we leverage in-context learning (ICL), wherein language models learn to make inferences by conditioning on a handful of demonstrations to enrich the context and propose a novel hashtag-driven in-context learning (HICL) framework. Concretely, we pre-train a model #Encoder, which employs #hashtags (user-annotated topic labels) to drive BERT-based pre-training through contrastive learning. Our objective here is to enable #Encoder to gain the ability to incorporate topic-related semantic information, which allows it to retrieve topic-related posts to enrich contexts and enhance social media NLU with noisy contexts. To further integrate the retrieved context with the source text, we employ a gradient-based method to identify trigger terms useful in fusing information from both sources. For empirical studies, we collected 45M tweets to set up an in-context NLU benchmark, and the experimental results on seven downstream tasks show that HICL substantially advances the previous state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, we conducted extensive analyzes and found that: (1) combining source input with a top-retrieved post from #Encoder is more effective than using semantically similar posts; (2) trigger words can largely benefit in merging context from the source and retrieved posts.

Conversational NLU providers often need to scale to thousands of intent-classification models where new customers often face the cold-start problem. Scaling to so many customers puts a constraint on storage space as well. In this paper, we explore four different zero and few-shot intent classification approaches with this low-resource constraint: 1) domain adaptation, 2) data augmentation, 3) zero-shot intent classification using descriptions large language models (LLMs), and 4) parameter-efficient fine-tuning of instruction-finetuned language models. Our results show that all these approaches are effective to different degrees in low-resource settings. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning using T-few recipe (Liu et al., 2022) on Flan-T5 (Chang et al., 2022) yields the best performance even with just one sample per intent. We also show that the zero-shot method of prompting LLMs using intent descriptions

Effective conversational search demands a deep understanding of user intent across multiple dialogue turns. Users frequently use abbreviations and shift topics in the middle of conversations, posing challenges for conventional retrievers. While query rewriting techniques improve clarity, they often incur significant computational cost due to additional autoregressive steps. Moreover, although LLM-based retrievers demonstrate strong performance, they are not explicitly optimized to track user intent in multi-turn settings, often failing under topic drift or contextual ambiguity. To address these limitations, we propose ContextualRetriever, a novel LLM-based retriever that directly incorporates conversational context into the retrieval process. Our approach introduces: (1) a context-aware embedding mechanism that highlights the current query within the dialogue history; (2) intent-guided supervision based on high-quality rewritten queries; and (3) a training strategy that preserves the generative capabilities of the base LLM. Extensive evaluations across multiple conversational search benchmarks demonstrate that ContextualRetriever significantly outperforms existing methods while incurring no additional inference overhead.

We propose a cascade of neural models that performs sentence classification, phrase recognition, and triple extraction to automatically structure the scholarly contributions of NLP publications. To identify the most important contribution sentences in a paper, we used a BERT-based classifier with positional features (Subtask 1). A BERT-CRF model was used to recognize and characterize relevant phrases in contribution sentences (Subtask 2). We categorized the triples into several types based on whether and how their elements were expressed in text, and addressed each type using separate BERT-based classifiers as well as rules (Subtask 3). Our system was officially ranked second in Phase 1 evaluation and first in both parts of Phase 2 evaluation. After fixing a submission error in Pharse 1, our approach yields the best results overall. In this paper, in addition to a system description, we also provide further analysis of our results, highlighting its strengths and limitations. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/Liu-Hy/nlp-contrib-graph.

In this paper, we present DuReader_retrieval, a large-scale Chinese dataset for passage retrieval. DuReader_retrieval contains more than 90K queries and over 8M unique passages from a commercial search engine. To alleviate the shortcomings of other datasets and ensure the quality of our benchmark, we (1) reduce the false negatives in development and test sets by manually annotating results pooled from multiple retrievers, and (2) remove the training queries that are semantically similar to the development and testing queries. Additionally, we provide two out-of-domain testing sets for cross-domain evaluation, as well as a set of human translated queries for for cross-lingual retrieval evaluation. The experiments demonstrate that DuReader_retrieval is challenging and a number of problems remain unsolved, such as the salient phrase mismatch and the syntactic mismatch between queries and paragraphs. These experiments also show that dense retrievers do not generalize well across domains, and cross-lingual retrieval is essentially challenging. DuReader_retrieval is publicly available at https://github.com/baidu/DuReader/tree/master/DuReader-Retrieval.

We study the problem of decomposing a complex text-to-sql task into smaller sub-tasks and how such a decomposition can significantly improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the reasoning process. There is currently a significant gap between the performance of fine-tuned models and prompting approaches using LLMs on challenging text-to-sql datasets such as Spider. We show that SQL queries, despite their declarative structure, can be broken down into sub-problems and the solutions of those sub-problems can be fed into LLMs to significantly improve their performance. Our experiments with three LLMs show that this approach consistently improves their performance by roughly 10%, pushing the accuracy of LLMs towards state-of-the-art, and even beating large fine-tuned models on the holdout Spider dataset.

Many recent approaches towards neural information retrieval mitigate their computational costs by using a multi-stage ranking pipeline. In the first stage, a number of potentially relevant candidates are retrieved using an efficient retrieval model such as BM25. Although BM25 has proven decent performance as a first-stage ranker, it tends to miss relevant passages. In this context we propose CoRT, a simple neural first-stage ranking model that leverages contextual representations from pretrained language models such as BERT to complement term-based ranking functions while causing no significant delay at query time. Using the MS MARCO dataset, we show that CoRT significantly increases the candidate recall by complementing BM25 with missing candidates. Consequently, we find subsequent re-rankers achieve superior results with less candidates. We further demonstrate that passage retrieval using CoRT can be realized with surprisingly low latencies.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, primarily through in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, the LLM is provided with examples that represent a given task such that it learns to generate answers for test inputs. However, access to these in-context examples is not guaranteed especially for low-resource or massively multilingual tasks. In this work, we propose an unsupervised approach to mine in-context examples for machine translation (MT), enabling unsupervised MT (UMT) across different languages. Our approach begins with word-level mining to acquire word translations that are then used to perform sentence-level mining. As the quality of mined parallel pairs may not be optimal due to noise or mistakes, we introduce a filtering criterion to select the optimal in-context examples from a pool of unsupervised parallel sentences. We evaluate our approach using two multilingual LLMs on 288 directions from the FLORES-200 dataset and analyze the impact of various linguistic features on performance. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our unsupervised approach in mining in-context examples for MT, leading to better or comparable translation performance as translation with regular in-context samples (extracted from human-annotated data), while also outperforming the other state-of-the-art UMT methods by an average of 7 BLEU points.

In recent times, the grandeur of Large Language Models (LLMs) has not only shone in the realm of natural language processing but has also cast its brilliance across a vast array of applications. This remarkable display of LLM capabilities has ignited a surge in research contributions within this domain, spanning a diverse spectrum of topics. These contributions encompass advancements in neural network architecture, context length enhancements, model alignment, training datasets, benchmarking, efficiency improvements, and more. Recent years have witnessed a dynamic synergy between academia and industry, propelling the field of LLM research to new heights. A notable milestone in this journey is the introduction of ChatGPT, a powerful AI chatbot grounded in LLMs, which has garnered widespread societal attention. The evolving technology of LLMs has begun to reshape the landscape of the entire AI community, promising a revolutionary shift in the way we create and employ AI algorithms. Given this swift-paced technical evolution, our survey embarks on a journey to encapsulate the recent strides made in the world of LLMs. Through an exploration of the background, key discoveries, and prevailing methodologies, we offer an up-to-the-minute review of the literature. By examining multiple LLM models, our paper not only presents a comprehensive overview but also charts a course that identifies existing challenges and points toward potential future research trajectories. This survey furnishes a well-rounded perspective on the current state of generative AI, shedding light on opportunities for further exploration, enhancement, and innovation.

Conversational systems often rely on embedding models for intent classification and intent clustering tasks. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), which enable instructional embeddings allowing one to adjust semantics over the embedding space using prompts, are being viewed as a panacea for these downstream conversational tasks. However, traditional evaluation benchmarks rely solely on task metrics that don't particularly measure gaps related to semantic understanding. Thus, we propose an intent semantic toolkit that gives a more holistic view of intent embedding models by considering three tasks -- (1) intent classification, (2) intent clustering, and (3) a novel triplet task. The triplet task gauges the model's understanding of two semantic concepts paramount in real-world conversational systems -- negation and implicature. We observe that current embedding models fare poorly in semantic understanding of these concepts. To address this, we propose a pre-training approach to improve the embedding model by leveraging augmentation with data generated by an auto-regressive model and a contrastive loss term. Our approach improves the semantic understanding of the intent embedding model on the aforementioned linguistic dimensions while slightly effecting their performance on downstream task metrics.

This paper summarizes our work on the first track of the ninth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC 9), "Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access". The goal of the task is to generate responses to user turns in a task-oriented dialog that require knowledge from unstructured documents. The task is divided into three subtasks: detection, selection and generation. In order to be compute efficient, we formulate the selection problem in terms of hierarchical classification steps. We achieve our best results with this model. Alternatively, we employ siamese sequence embedding models, referred to as Dense Knowledge Retrieval, to retrieve relevant documents. This method further reduces the computation time by a factor of more than 100x at the cost of degradation in R@1 of 5-6% compared to the first model. Then for either approach, we use Retrieval Augmented Generation to generate responses based on multiple selected snippets and we show how the method can be used to fine-tune trained embeddings.

We introduce a stochastic graph-based method for computing relative importance of textual units for Natural Language Processing. We test the technique on the problem of Text Summarization (TS). Extractive TS relies on the concept of sentence salience to identify the most important sentences in a document or set of documents. Salience is typically defined in terms of the presence of particular important words or in terms of similarity to a centroid pseudo-sentence. We consider a new approach, LexRank, for computing sentence importance based on the concept of eigenvector centrality in a graph representation of sentences. In this model, a connectivity matrix based on intra-sentence cosine similarity is used as the adjacency matrix of the graph representation of sentences. Our system, based on LexRank ranked in first place in more than one task in the recent DUC 2004 evaluation. In this paper we present a detailed analysis of our approach and apply it to a larger data set including data from earlier DUC evaluations. We discuss several methods to compute centrality using the similarity graph. The results show that degree-based methods (including LexRank) outperform both centroid-based methods and other systems participating in DUC in most of the cases. Furthermore, the LexRank with threshold method outperforms the other degree-based techniques including continuous LexRank. We also show that our approach is quite insensitive to the noise in the data that may result from an imperfect topical clustering of documents.

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.

In this work, we focus on the problem of retrieving relevant arguments for a query claim covering diverse aspects. State-of-the-art methods rely on explicit mappings between claims and premises, and thus are unable to utilize large available collections of premises without laborious and costly manual annotation. Their diversity approach relies on removing duplicates via clustering which does not directly ensure that the selected premises cover all aspects. This work introduces a new multi-step approach for the argument retrieval problem. Rather than relying on ground-truth assignments, our approach employs a machine learning model to capture semantic relationships between arguments. Beyond that, it aims to cover diverse facets of the query, instead of trying to identify duplicates explicitly. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that our approach leads to a significant improvement in the argument retrieval task even though it requires less data.

In the dynamic landscape of generative NLP, traditional text processing pipelines limit research flexibility and reproducibility, as they are tailored to specific dataset, task, and model combinations. The escalating complexity, involving system prompts, model-specific formats, instructions, and more, calls for a shift to a structured, modular, and customizable solution. Addressing this need, we present Unitxt, an innovative library for customizable textual data preparation and evaluation tailored to generative language models. Unitxt natively integrates with common libraries like HuggingFace and LM-eval-harness and deconstructs processing flows into modular components, enabling easy customization and sharing between practitioners. These components encompass model-specific formats, task prompts, and many other comprehensive dataset processing definitions. The Unitxt-Catalog centralizes these components, fostering collaboration and exploration in modern textual data workflows. Beyond being a tool, Unitxt is a community-driven platform, empowering users to build, share, and advance their pipelines collaboratively. Join the Unitxt community at https://github.com/IBM/unitxt!

Given that Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in writing code, can they now be used to autonomously reproduce results from research repositories? Such a capability would be a boon to the research community, helping researchers validate, understand, and extend prior work. To advance towards this goal, we introduce SUPER, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the capability of LLMs in setting up and executing tasks from research repositories. SUPERaims to capture the realistic challenges faced by researchers working with Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) research repositories. Our benchmark comprises three distinct problem sets: 45 end-to-end problems with annotated expert solutions, 152 sub problems derived from the expert set that focus on specific challenges (e.g., configuring a trainer), and 602 automatically generated problems for larger-scale development. We introduce various evaluation measures to assess both task success and progress, utilizing gold solutions when available or approximations otherwise. We show that state-of-the-art approaches struggle to solve these problems with the best model (GPT-4o) solving only 16.3% of the end-to-end set, and 46.1% of the scenarios. This illustrates the challenge of this task, and suggests that SUPER can serve as a valuable resource for the community to make and measure progress.

Lexical Simplification (LS) automatically replaces difficult to read words for easier alternatives while preserving a sentence's original meaning. LS is a precursor to Text Simplification with the aim of improving text accessibility to various target demographics, including children, second language learners, individuals with reading disabilities or low literacy. Several datasets exist for LS. These LS datasets specialize on one or two sub-tasks within the LS pipeline. However, as of this moment, no single LS dataset has been developed that covers all LS sub-tasks. We present MultiLS, the first LS framework that allows for the creation of a multi-task LS dataset. We also present MultiLS-PT, the first dataset to be created using the MultiLS framework. We demonstrate the potential of MultiLS-PT by carrying out all LS sub-tasks of (1). lexical complexity prediction (LCP), (2). substitute generation, and (3). substitute ranking for Portuguese. Model performances are reported, ranging from transformer-based models to more recent large language models (LLMs).

Ranking documents using Large Language Models (LLMs) by directly feeding the query and candidate documents into the prompt is an interesting and practical problem. However, there has been limited success so far, as researchers have found it difficult to outperform fine-tuned baseline rankers on benchmark datasets. We analyze pointwise and listwise ranking prompts used by existing methods and argue that off-the-shelf LLMs do not fully understand these ranking formulations, possibly due to the nature of how LLMs are trained. In this paper, we propose to significantly reduce the burden on LLMs by using a new technique called Pairwise Ranking Prompting (PRP). Our results are the first in the literature to achieve state-of-the-art ranking performance on standard benchmarks using moderate-sized open-sourced LLMs. On TREC-DL2020, PRP based on the Flan-UL2 model with 20B parameters outperforms the previous best approach in the literature, which is based on the blackbox commercial GPT-4 that has 50x (estimated) model size, by over 5% at NDCG@1. On TREC-DL2019, PRP is only inferior to the GPT-4 solution on the NDCG@5 and NDCG@10 metrics, while outperforming other existing solutions, such as InstructGPT which has 175B parameters, by over 10% for nearly all ranking metrics. Furthermore, we propose several variants of PRP to improve efficiency and show that it is possible to achieve competitive results even with linear complexity. We also discuss other benefits of PRP, such as supporting both generation and scoring LLM APIs, as well as being insensitive to input ordering.

This work presents an unsupervised method for automatically constructing and expanding topic taxonomies by using instruction-based fine-tuned LLMs (Large Language Models). We apply topic modeling and keyword extraction techniques to create initial topic taxonomies and LLMs to post-process the resulting terms and create a hierarchy. To expand an existing taxonomy with new terms, we use zero-shot prompting to find out where to add new nodes, which, to our knowledge, is the first work to present such an approach to taxonomy tasks. We use the resulting taxonomies to assign tags that characterize merchants from a retail bank dataset. To evaluate our work, we asked 12 volunteers to answer a two-part form in which we first assessed the quality of the taxonomies created and then the tags assigned to merchants based on that taxonomy. The evaluation revealed a coherence rate exceeding 90% for the chosen taxonomies, while the average coherence for merchant tagging surpassed 80%.

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) aims to teach machines to read and comprehend human languages, which is a long-standing goal of natural language processing (NLP). With the burst of deep neural networks and the evolution of contextualized language models (CLMs), the research of MRC has experienced two significant breakthroughs. MRC and CLM, as a phenomenon, have a great impact on the NLP community. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and comparative review on MRC covering overall research topics about 1) the origin and development of MRC and CLM, with a particular focus on the role of CLMs; 2) the impact of MRC and CLM to the NLP community; 3) the definition, datasets, and evaluation of MRC; 4) general MRC architecture and technical methods in the view of two-stage Encoder-Decoder solving architecture from the insights of the cognitive process of humans; 5) previous highlights, emerging topics, and our empirical analysis, among which we especially focus on what works in different periods of MRC researches. We propose a full-view categorization and new taxonomies on these topics. The primary views we have arrived at are that 1) MRC boosts the progress from language processing to understanding; 2) the rapid improvement of MRC systems greatly benefits from the development of CLMs; 3) the theme of MRC is gradually moving from shallow text matching to cognitive reasoning.

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.

In this work, we propose a simple method that applies a large language model (LLM) to large-scale retrieval in zero-shot scenarios. Our method, the Language language model as Retriever (LameR), is built upon no other neural models but an LLM, while breaking brute-force combinations of retrievers with LLMs and lifting the performance of zero-shot retrieval to be very competitive on benchmark datasets. Essentially, we propose to augment a query with its potential answers by prompting LLMs with a composition of the query and the query's in-domain candidates. The candidates, regardless of correct or wrong, are obtained by a vanilla retrieval procedure on the target collection. As a part of the prompts, they are likely to help LLM generate more precise answers by pattern imitation or candidate summarization. Even if all the candidates are wrong, the prompts at least make LLM aware of in-collection patterns and genres. Moreover, due to the low performance of a self-supervised retriever, the LLM-based query augmentation becomes less effective as the retriever bottlenecks the whole pipeline. Therefore, we propose to leverage a non-parametric lexicon-based method (e.g., BM25) as the retrieval module to capture query-document overlap in a literal fashion. As such, LameR makes the retrieval procedure transparent to the LLM, thus circumventing the performance bottleneck.

Sentence embedding models play a key role in various Natural Language Processing tasks, such as in Topic Modeling, Document Clustering and Recommendation Systems. However, these models rely heavily on parallel data, which can be scarce for many low-resource languages, including Luxembourgish. This scarcity results in suboptimal performance of monolingual and cross-lingual sentence embedding models for these languages. To address this issue, we compile a relatively small but high-quality human-generated cross-lingual parallel dataset to train \tool, an enhanced sentence embedding model for Luxembourgish with strong cross-lingual capabilities. Additionally, we present evidence suggesting that including low-resource languages in parallel training datasets can be more advantageous for other low-resource languages than relying solely on high-resource language pairs. Furthermore, recognizing the lack of sentence embedding benchmarks for low-resource languages, we create a paraphrase detection benchmark specifically for Luxembourgish, aiming to partially fill this gap and promote further research.

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.

Language models have become a critical technology to tackling a wide range of natural language processing tasks, yet many details about how the best-performing language models were developed are not reported. In particular, information about their pretraining corpora is seldom discussed: commercial language models rarely provide any information about their data; even open models rarely release datasets they are trained on, or an exact recipe to reproduce them. As a result, it is challenging to conduct certain threads of language modeling research, such as understanding how training data impacts model capabilities and shapes their limitations. To facilitate open research on language model pretraining, we release Dolma, a three trillion tokens English corpus, built from a diverse mixture of web content, scientific papers, code, public-domain books, social media, and encyclopedic materials. In addition, we open source our data curation toolkit to enable further experimentation and reproduction of our work. In this report, we document Dolma, including its design principles, details about its construction, and a summary of its contents. We interleave this report with analyses and experimental results from training language models on intermediate states of Dolma to share what we have learned about important data curation practices, including the role of content or quality filters, deduplication, and multi-source mixing. Dolma has been used to train OLMo, a state-of-the-art, open language model and framework designed to build and study the science of language modeling.

Modern IR systems are increasingly tasked with answering complex, multi-faceted queries that require deep reasoning rather than simple keyword or semantic matching. While LLM-based IR has shown great promise, the prevailing retrieve-then-rerank paradigm inherits the limitations of embedding-based retrieval; parametric generative approaches are difficult to update with new information; and long-context methods that place the entire corpus in context are computationally infeasible for large document collections. To address these challenges, we introduce LATTICE, a hierarchical retrieval framework that enables an LLM to reason over and navigate large corpora with logarithmic search complexity by imposing a semantic tree structure on the corpus. Our approach consists of two stages: (1) an offline phase that organizes the corpus into a semantic hierarchy via either a bottom-up agglomerative strategy or a top-down divisive strategy using multi-level summaries and (2) an online traversal phase where a search LLM navigates this tree. A central challenge in such LLM-guided search is that the model's relevance judgments are noisy, context-dependent, and unaware of the hierarchy, making cross-branch and cross-level comparisons difficult. To overcome this, we propose a traversal algorithm that estimates calibrated latent relevance scores from local LLM outputs and aggregates them into a global path relevance metric. Our training-free framework achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on the reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmark, demonstrating up to 9% improvement in Recall@100 and 5% in nDCG@10 over the next best zero-shot baseline. Furthermore, compared to the fine-tuned SOTA method DIVER-v2, LATTICE attains comparable results on BRIGHT subsets that use a static corpus for evaluation.

This research explores the integration of large language models (LLMs) into scientific data assimilation, focusing on combustion science as a case study. Leveraging foundational models integrated with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, the study introduces an approach to process diverse combustion research data, spanning experimental studies, simulations, and literature. The multifaceted nature of combustion research emphasizes the critical role of knowledge processing in navigating and extracting valuable information from a vast and diverse pool of sources. The developed approach minimizes computational and economic expenses while optimizing data privacy and accuracy. It incorporates prompt engineering and offline open-source LLMs, offering user autonomy in selecting base models. The study provides a thorough examination of text segmentation strategies, conducts comparative studies between LLMs, and explores various optimized prompts to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework. By incorporating an external database, the framework outperforms a conventional LLM in generating accurate responses and constructing robust arguments. Additionally, the study delves into the investigation of optimized prompt templates for the purpose of efficient extraction of scientific literature. The research addresses concerns related to hallucinations and false research articles by introducing a custom workflow developed with a detection algorithm to filter out inaccuracies. Despite identified areas for improvement, the framework consistently delivers accurate domain-specific responses with minimal human oversight. The prompt-agnostic approach introduced holds promise for future deliberations. The study underscores the significance of integrating LLMs and knowledge processing techniques in scientific research, providing a foundation for advancements in data assimilation and utilization.

As the performance of large language models rapidly improves, benchmarks are getting larger and more complex as well. We present LMentry, a benchmark that avoids this "arms race" by focusing on a compact set of tasks that are trivial to humans, e.g. writing a sentence containing a specific word, identifying which words in a list belong to a specific category, or choosing which of two words is longer. LMentry is specifically designed to provide quick and interpretable insights into the capabilities and robustness of large language models. Our experiments reveal a wide variety of failure cases that, while immediately obvious to humans, pose a considerable challenge for large language models, including OpenAI's latest 175B-parameter instruction-tuned model, TextDavinci002. LMentry complements contemporary evaluation approaches of large language models, providing a quick, automatic, and easy-to-run "unit test", without resorting to large benchmark suites of complex tasks.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a new paradigm for Text-to-SQL task. However, the absence of a systematical benchmark inhibits the development of designing effective, efficient and economic LLM-based Text-to-SQL solutions. To address this challenge, in this paper, we first conduct a systematical and extensive comparison over existing prompt engineering methods, including question representation, example selection and example organization, and with these experimental results, we elaborate their pros and cons. Based on these findings, we propose a new integrated solution, named DAIL-SQL, which refreshes the Spider leaderboard with 86.6% execution accuracy and sets a new bar. To explore the potential of open-source LLM, we investigate them in various scenarios, and further enhance their performance with supervised fine-tuning. Our explorations highlight open-source LLMs' potential in Text-to-SQL, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the supervised fine-tuning. Additionally, towards an efficient and economic LLM-based Text-to-SQL solution, we emphasize the token efficiency in prompt engineering and compare the prior studies under this metric. We hope that our work provides a deeper understanding of Text-to-SQL with LLMs, and inspires further investigations and broad applications.

In this work, we introduce sequence-to-sequence language resources for Catalan, a moderately under-resourced language, towards two tasks, namely: Summarization and Machine Translation (MT). We present two new abstractive summarization datasets in the domain of newswire. We also introduce a parallel Catalan-English corpus, paired with three different brand new test sets. Finally, we evaluate the data presented with competing state of the art models, and we develop baselines for these tasks using a newly created Catalan BART. We release the resulting resources of this work under open license to encourage the development of language technology in Catalan.

The paradigm of Large Language Models (LLMs) has increasingly shifted toward agentic applications, where web browsing capabilities are fundamental for retrieving information from diverse online sources. However, existing open-source web agents either demonstrate limited information-seeking abilities on complex tasks or lack transparent implementations. In this work, we identify that the key challenge lies in the scarcity of challenging data for information seeking. To address this limitation, we introduce WebExplorer: a systematic data generation approach using model-based exploration and iterative, long-to-short query evolution. This method creates challenging query-answer pairs that require multi-step reasoning and complex web navigation. By leveraging our curated high-quality dataset, we successfully develop advanced web agent WebExplorer-8B through supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning. Our model supports 128K context length and up to 100 tool calling turns, enabling long-horizon problem solving. Across diverse information-seeking benchmarks, WebExplorer-8B achieves the state-of-the-art performance at its scale. Notably, as an 8B-sized model, WebExplorer-8B is able to effectively search over an average of 16 turns after RL training, achieving higher accuracy than WebSailor-72B on BrowseComp-en/zh and attaining the best performance among models up to 100B parameters on WebWalkerQA and FRAMES. Beyond these information-seeking tasks, our model also achieves strong generalization on the HLE benchmark even though it is only trained on knowledge-intensive QA data. These results highlight our approach as a practical path toward long-horizon web agents.