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Recent advancements in Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) predominantly leverage pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, a notable challenge with fine-tuned PLM-based CSC models is their tendency to over-correct, leading to poor generalization for error patterns outside the standard distribution. To address this, we developed a teacher network guided by prior knowledge for distillation learning of CSC models. Unlike traditional teacher networks, which depend on task-related pre-training, our method infuses task-related prior information into the teacher network, offering guidance beyond mere labels to the student network. This strategy significantly enhances the CSC model&#39;s language modeling capabilities, crucial for minimizing over-correction. Importantly, our approach is model-independent and the teacher network does not require task-related pre-training, making it broadly applicable for enhancing various PLM-based CSC models with minimal additional computational resources. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results. Additionally, we explored the potential of generalizing our method to other non-autoregressive text-generation tasks.

ACL 2024

Training a Better Chinese Spelling Correction Model via Prior-knowledge Guided Teacher

distillation learning

chinese spelling correction

pre-trained language models

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Recent advancements in Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) predominantly leverage pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, a notable challenge with fine-tuned PLM-based CSC models is their tendency to over-correct, leading to poor generalization for error patterns outside the standard distribution. To address this, we developed a teacher network guided by prior knowledge for distillation learning of CSC models. Unlike traditional teacher networks, which depend on task-related pre-training, our method infuses task-related prior information into the teacher network, offering guidance beyond mere labels to the student network. This strategy significantly enhances the CSC model's language modeling capabilities, crucial for minimizing over-correction. Importantly, our approach is model-independent and the teacher network does not require task-related pre-training, making it broadly applicable for enhancing various PLM-based CSC models with minimal additional computational resources. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results. Additionally, we explored the potential of generalizing our method to other non-autoregressive text-generation tasks.

poster

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Extracting semantic topics from short texts presents a significant challenge in the field of data mining. While efforts have been made to mitigate data sparsity issue, the limited length of short documents also results in the absence of semantically relevant words, causing biased evidence lower bound and incomplete labels for likelihood maximization. We refer to this issue as the label sparsity problem. To combat this problem, we propose kNNTM, a neural short text topic model that incorporates a $k$-Nearest-Neighbor-based label completion algorithm by augmenting the reconstruction label with $k$-nearest documents to complement these relevant but unobserved words. Furthermore, seeking a precise reflection of distances between documents, we propose a fused multi-view distances metric that takes both local word similarities and global topic semantics into consideration. Extensive experiments on multiple public short-text datasets show that kNNTM model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline models and can derive both high-quality topics and document representations.

Combating Label Sparsity in Short Text Topic Modeling via Nearest Neighbor Augmentation

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) exhibit promise in retrieval tasks but struggle with out-of-domain data due to distribution shifts.
Addressing this, generative domain adaptation (DA), known as GPL, tackles distribution shifts by generating pseudo queries and labels to train models for predicting query-document relationships in new domains.
However, it overlooks the domain distribution, causing the model to struggle with aligning the distribution in the target domain.
We, therefore, propose a Distribution-Aware Domain Adaptation (DADA) to guide the model to consider the domain distribution knowledge at the level of both a single document and the corpus, which is referred to as observation-level feedback and domain-level feedback, respectively.
Our method effectively adapts the model to the target domain and expands document representation to unseen gold query terms using domain and observation feedback, as demonstrated by empirical results on the BEIR benchmark.

DADA: Distribution-Aware Domain Adaptation of PLMs for Information Retrieval

Whilst fact verification has attracted substantial interest in the natural language processing community, verifying misinforming statements against data visualizations such as charts has so far been overlooked. Charts are commonly used in the real-world to summarize and com municate key information, but they can also be easily misused to spread misinformation and promote certain agendas. In this paper, we introduce ChartCheck, a novel, large-scale dataset for explainable fact-checking against real-world charts, consisting of 1.7k charts and 10.5k human-written claims and explanations. We systematically evaluate ChartCheck using vision-language and chart-to-table models, and propose a baseline to the community. Finally, we study chart reasoning types and visual attributes that pose a challenge to these models.

ChartCheck: Explainable Fact-Checking over Real-World Chart Images

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide array of text-centric tasks. However, their `large' scale introduces significant computational and storage challenges, particularly in managing the key-value states of the transformer, which limits their wider applicability. Therefore, we propose to adaptively release resources from caches and rebuild the necessary key-value states. Particularly, we accomplish this by a lightweight controller module to approximate an ideal top-$K$ sparse attention. This module retains the tokens with the highest top-$K$ attention weights and simultaneously rebuilds the discarded but necessary tokens, which may become essential for future decoding. Comprehensive experiments in natural language generation and modeling reveal that our method is not only competitive with full attention in terms of performance but also achieves a significant throughput improvement of up to $\textbf{221.8}$\%. The code for replication is available on the https://github.com/WHUIR/ADORE.

Efficient Sparse Attention needs Adaptive Token Release

As Machine Learning (ML) models grow in size and demand higher-quality training data, the expenses associated with re-training and fine-tuning these models are escalating rapidly. Inspired by recent impressive achievements of Large Language Models (LLMs) in different fields, this paper delves into the question: can LLMs efficiently improve an ML's performance at a minimal cost? We show that, through our proposed training-free framework LLMCorr, an LLM can work as a post-hoc corrector to propose corrections for the predictions of an arbitrary ML model. In particular, we form a contextual knowledge database by incorporating the dataset's label information and the ML model's predictions on the validation dataset. Leveraging the in-context learning capability of LLMs, we ask the LLM to summarise the instances in which the ML model makes mistakes and the correlation between primary predictions and true labels. Following this, the LLM can transfer its acquired knowledge to suggest corrections for the ML model's predictions. Our experimental results on text analysis and the challenging molecular predictions show that LLMCorr improves the performance of a number of models by up to 39%.

Harnessing Large Language Models as Post-hoc Correctors

Large language models (LLMs) showcase impressive reasoning capabilities when coupled with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, the robustness of this approach warrants further investigation. In this paper, we introduce a novel scenario termed preemptive answers, where the LLM obtains an answer before engaging in reasoning. This situation can arise inadvertently or induced by malicious users by prompt injection attacks. Experiments reveal that preemptive answers significantly impair the model's reasoning capability across various CoT methods and a broad spectrum of datasets. To bolster the robustness of reasoning, we propose two measures aimed at mitigating this issue to some extent.

Preemptive Answer “Attacks” on Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Current language models demonstrate remarkable proficiency in text generation. However, for many applications it is desirable to control attributes, such as sentiment, or toxicity, of the generated language---ideally tailored towards each specific use case and target audience. For auto-regressive language models, existing guidance methods are prone to decoding errors that cascade during generation and degrade performance. In contrast, text diffusion models can easily be guided with, for example, a simple linear sentiment classifier---however they do suffer from significantly higher perplexity than auto-regressive alternatives. In this paper we use a guided diffusion model to produce a latent proposal that steers an auto-regressive language model to generate text with desired properties. Our model inherits the unmatched fluency of the auto-regressive approach and the plug-and-play flexibility of diffusion. We show that it outperforms previous plug-and-play guidance methods across a wide range of benchmark data sets. Further, controlling a new attribute in our framework is reduced to training a single logistic regression classifier.

Diffusion Guided Language Modeling

The task of model editing becomes popular for correcting inaccurate or outdated parametric knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, there are major limitations of state of the art (SOTA) model editing methods, including the excessive memorization issue caused by the direct editing methods, as well as the error propagation and knowledge conflict issues from the memory enhancement methods, resulting in hindering models' *portability*, e.g., the ability to transfer the new knowledge to related one-hop or multi-hop content. To address these issues, we propose the InstructEd method, the idea of which is to insert soft instructions into the attention module so as to facilitate interactions between instructions and questions and to understand and utilize new facts. Our main findings are: (i) InstructEd has achieved SOTA performance on three datasets for one-hop/multi-hop evaluation with LLaMAs and GPT2, achieving 10\% (5\%) improvement in one-hop (multi-hop) model editing.(ii) Different from earlier methods on editing parameters in FFN, we show that editing attention can also help. (iii) Model editing is highly related to retrieval augmented methods, which can help improve the locality of model editing while slightly decrease the editing performance with hops.

InstructEd: Soft-Instruction Tuning for Model Editing with Hops

The democratization of pre-trained language models through open-source initiatives has rapidly advanced innovation and expanded access to cutting-edge technologies. However, this openness also brings significant security risks, including backdoor attacks, where hidden malicious behaviors are triggered by specific inputs, compromising natural language processing (NLP) system integrity and reliability. This paper suggests that merging a backdoored model with other homogeneous models can significantly remediate backdoor vulnerabilities even if such models are not entirely secure. In our experiments, we verify our hypothesis on various models (BERT-Base, RoBERTa-Large, Llama2-7B, and Mistral-7B) and datasets (SST-2, OLID, AG News, and QNLI). Compared to multiple advanced defensive approaches, our method offers an effective and efficient inference-stage defense against backdoor attacks on classification and instruction-tuned tasks without additional resources or specific knowledge. Our approach consistently outperforms recent advanced baselines, leading to an average of about 75\% reduction in the attack success rate. Since model merging has been an established approach for improving model performance, the extra advantage it provides regarding defense can be seen as a cost-free bonus.

Here’s a Free Lunch: Sanitizing Backdoored Models with Model Merge

Automatic text simplification focuses on transforming texts into a more comprehensible version without sacrificing their precision. However, automatic methods usually require (paired) datasets that can be rather scarce in languages other than English. This paper presents a new approach to automatic sentence simplification that leverages paraphrases, context, and linguistic attributes to overcome the absence of paired texts in Portuguese.
We frame the simplification problem as a textual style transfer task and learn a style representation using the sentences around the target sentence in the document and its linguistic attributes. 
Moreover, unlike most unsupervised approaches that require style-labeled training data, we fine-tune strong pre-trained models using sentence-level paraphrases instead of annotated data. 
Our experiments show that our model achieves remarkable results, surpassing the current state-of-the-art (BART+ACCESS) while competitively matching a Large Language Model.

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Combating Label Sparsity in Short Text Topic Modeling via Nearest Neighbor Augmentation

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