Enhancing the attribution in large language models (LLMs) is a crucial task. One feasible approach is to enable LLMs to cite external sources that support their generations. However, existing datasets and evaluation methods in this domain still exhibit notable limitations. In this work, we formulate the task of attributed query-focused summarization (AQFS) and present WebCiteS, a Chinese dataset featuring 7k human-annotated summaries with citations. WebCiteS derives from real-world user queries and web search results, offering a valuable resource for model training and evaluation. Prior works in attribution evaluation do not differentiate between groundedness errors and citation errors. They also fall short in automatically verifying sentences that draw partial support from multiple sources. We tackle these issues by developing detailed metrics and enabling the automatic evaluator to decompose the sentences into sub-claims for fine-grained verification. Our comprehensive evaluation of both open-source and proprietary models on WebCiteS highlights the challenge LLMs face in correctly citing sources, underscoring the necessity for further improvement. The dataset and code will be open-sourced to facilitate further research in this crucial field.

Event skeleton generation, aiming to induce an event schema skeleton graph with abstracted event nodes and their temporal relations from a set of event instance graphs, is a critical step in the temporal complex event schema induction task. Existing methods effectively address this task from a graph generation perspective but suffer from noise-sensitive and error accumulation, e.g., the inability to correct errors while generating schema. We, therefore, propose a novel Diffusion Event Graph Model (DEGM) to address these issues. Our DEGM is the first workable diffusion model for event skeleton generation, where the embedding and rounding techniques with a custom edge-based loss are introduced to transform a discrete event graph into learnable latent representations. Furthermore, we propose a denoising training process to maintain the model’s robustness. Consequently, DEGM derives the final schema, where error correction is guaranteed by iteratively refining the latent representations during the schema generation process. Experimental results on three IED bombing datasets demonstrate that our DEGM achieves better results than other state-of-the-art baselines. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zhufq00/EventSkeletonGeneration.

The de facto way of utilizing black-box large language models (LLMs) to perform various downstream tasks is prompting. However, obtaining suitable prompts for specific tasks is still a challenging problem. While existing LLM-based methods demonstrate promising performance in task-oriented dialogue (TOD) task, they often require manual adjustment in prompt selection, or focus solely on dialogue understanding or generation. To address these issues, we propose an adaptive prompt generation framework to fully unleash the potential of LLMs for the comprehensive TOD system. Firstly, we design a trainable slot generator (TSG) that can generate domain and slot information in the belief state, which serves as prior knowledge for subsequent prompt generation. Next, we propose an adaptive prompt generator (APG) that utilizes the prior knowledge to generate prompts for the LLM, deriving the belief state and system response of the dialogue for evaluation. Finally, we evaluate our framework on the MultiWOZ 2.0 dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods. Our code and data will be released.

We present IBR, an Iterative Backward Reasoning model to solve the proof generation tasks on rule-based Question Answering (QA), where models are required to reason over a series of textual rules and facts to find out the related proof path and derive the final answer. We handle the limitations of existed works in two folds: 1) enhance the interpretability of reasoning procedures with detailed tracking, by predicting nodes and edges in the proof path iteratively backward from the question; 2) promote the efficiency and accuracy via reasoning on the elaborate representations of nodes and history paths, without any intermediate texts that may introduce external noise during proof generation. There are three main modules in IBR, QA and proof strategy prediction to obtain the answer and offer guidance for the following procedure; parent node prediction to determine a node in the existing proof that a new child node will link to; child node prediction to find out which new node will be added to the proof. Experiments on both synthetic and paraphrased datasets demonstrate that IBR has better in-domain performance as well as cross-domain transferability than several strong baselines. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/find-knowledge/IBR.

The memes serve as an important tool in online communication, whereas some hateful memes endanger cyberspace by attacking certain people or subjects. Recent studies address hateful memes detection while further understanding of relationships of entities in memes remains unexplored. This paper presents our work at the Constraint@ACL2022 Shared Task: Hero, Villain and Victim: Dissecting harmful memes for semantic role labelling of entities. In particular, we propose our approach utilizing transformer-based multimodal models through a VCR method with data augmentation, continual pretraining, loss re-weighting, and ensemble learning. We describe the models used, the ways of preprocessing and experiments implementation. As a result, our best model achieves the Macro F1-score of 54.707 on the test set of this shared task.

Representations of events described in text are important for various tasks. In this work, we present SWCC: a Simultaneous Weakly supervised Contrastive learning and Clustering framework for event representation learning. SWCC learns event representations by making better use of co-occurrence information of events. Specifically, we introduce a weakly supervised contrastive learning method that allows us to consider multiple positives and multiple negatives, and a prototype-based clustering method that avoids semantically related events being pulled apart. For model training, SWCC learns representations by simultaneously performing weakly supervised contrastive learning and prototype-based clustering. Experimental results show that SWCC outperforms other baselines on Hard Similarity and Transitive Sentence Similarity tasks. In addition, a thorough analysis of the prototype-based clustering method demonstrates that the learned prototype vectors are able to implicitly capture various relations between events.

Event extraction (EE) is crucial to downstream tasks such as new aggregation and event knowledge graph construction. Most existing EE datasets manually define fixed event types and design specific schema for each of them, failing to cover diverse events emerging from the online text. Moreover, news titles, an important source of event mentions, have not gained enough attention in current EE research. In this paper, we present Title2Event, a large-scale sentence-level dataset benchmarking Open Event Extraction without restricting event types. Title2Event contains more than 42,000 news titles in 34 topics collected from Chinese web pages. To the best of our knowledge, it is currently the largest manually annotated Chinese dataset for open event extraction. We further conduct experiments on Title2Event with different models and show that the characteristics of titles make it challenging for event extraction, addressing the significance of advanced study on this problem. The dataset and baseline codes are available at https://open-event-hub.github.io/title2event.

We present Twin Answer Sentences Attack (TASA), an adversarial attack method for question answering (QA) models that produces fluent and grammatical adversarial contexts while maintaining gold answers. Despite phenomenal progress on general adversarial attacks, few works have investigated the vulnerability and attack specifically for QA models. In this work, we first explore the biases in the existing models and discover that they mainly rely on keyword matching between the question and context, and ignore the relevant contextual relations for answer prediction.Based on two biases above, TASA attacks the target model in two folds: (1) lowering the model’s confidence on the gold answer with a perturbed answer sentence; (2) misguiding the model towards a wrong answer with a distracting answer sentence. Equipped with designed beam search and filtering methods, TASA can generate more effective attacks than existing textual attack methods while sustaining the quality of contexts, in extensive experiments on five QA datasets and human evaluations.

We present Mask-then-Fill, a flexible and effective data augmentation framework for event extraction. Our approach allows for more flexible manipulation of text and thus can generate more diverse data while keeping the original event structure unchanged as much as possible. Specifically, it first randomly masks out an adjunct sentence fragment and then infills a variable-length text span with a fine-tuned infilling model. The main advantage lies in that it can replace a fragment of arbitrary length in the text with another fragment of variable length, compared to the existing methods which can only replace a single word or a fixed-length fragment. On trigger and argument extraction tasks, the proposed framework is more effective than baseline methods and it demonstrates particularly strong results in the low-resource setting. Our further analysis shows that it achieves a good balance between diversity and distributional similarity.

Current approaches to empathetic response generation focus on learning a model to predict an emotion label and generate a response based on this label and have achieved promising results. However, the emotion cause, an essential factor for empathetic responding, is ignored. The emotion cause is a stimulus for human emotions. Recognizing the emotion cause is helpful to better understand human emotions so as to generate more empathetic responses. To this end, we propose a novel framework that improves empathetic response generation by recognizing emotion cause in conversations. Specifically, an emotion reasoner is designed to predict a context emotion label and a sequence of emotion cause-oriented labels, which indicate whether the word is related to the emotion cause. Then we devise both hard and soft gated attention mechanisms to incorporate the emotion cause into response generation. Experiments show that incorporating emotion cause information improves the performance of the model on both emotion recognition and response generation.

Sentence function is an important linguistic feature referring to a user’s purpose in uttering a specific sentence. The use of sentence function has shown promising results to improve the performance of conversation models. However, there is no large conversation dataset annotated with sentence functions. In this work, we collect a new Short-Text Conversation dataset with manually annotated SEntence FUNctions (STC-Sefun). Classification models are trained on this dataset to (i) recognize the sentence function of new data in a large corpus of short-text conversations; (ii) estimate a proper sentence function of the response given a test query. We later train conversation models conditioned on the sentence functions, including information retrieval-based and neural generative models. Experimental results demonstrate that the use of sentence functions can help improve the quality of the returned responses.

Neural conversation models such as encoder-decoder models are easy to generate bland and generic responses. Some researchers propose to use the conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) which maximizes the lower bound on the conditional log-likelihood on a continuous latent variable. With different sampled latent variables, the model is expected to generate diverse responses. Although the CVAE-based models have shown tremendous potential, their improvement of generating high-quality responses is still unsatisfactory. In this paper, we introduce a discrete latent variable with an explicit semantic meaning to improve the CVAE on short-text conversation. A major advantage of our model is that we can exploit the semantic distance between the latent variables to maintain good diversity between the sampled latent variables. Accordingly, we propose a two-stage sampling approach to enable efficient diverse variable selection from a large latent space assumed in the short-text conversation task. Experimental results indicate that our model outperforms various kinds of generation models under both automatic and human evaluations and generates more diverse and informative responses.

Sequence-to-sequence neural generation models have achieved promising performance on short text conversation tasks. However, they tend to generate generic/dull responses, leading to unsatisfying dialogue experience. We observe that in the conversation tasks, each query could have multiple responses, which forms a 1-to-n or m-to-n relationship in the view of the total corpus. The objective function used in standard sequence-to-sequence models will be dominated by loss terms with generic patterns. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a statistical re-weighting method that assigns different weights for the multiple responses of the same query, and trains the common neural generation model with the weights. Experimental results on a large Chinese dialogue corpus show that our method improves the acceptance rate of generated responses compared with several baseline models and significantly reduces the number of generated generic responses.