The Sequential Sentence Classification task within the domain of medical abstracts, termed as SSC, involves the categorization of sentences into pre-defined headings based on their roles in conveying critical information in the abstract. In the SSC task, sentences are sequentially related to each other. For this reason, the role of sentence embeddings is crucial for capturing both the semantic information between words in the sentence and the contextual relationship of sentences within the abstract, which then enhances the SSC system performance. In this paper, we propose a LSTM-based deep learning network with a focus on creating comprehensive sentence representation at the sentence level. To demonstrate the efficacy of the created sentence representation, a system utilizing these sentence embeddings is also developed, which consists of a Convolutional-Recurrent neural network (C-RNN) at the abstract level and a multi-layer perception network (MLP) at the segment level. Our proposed system yields highly competitive results compared to state-of-the-art systems and further enhances the F1 scores of the baseline by 1.0%, 2.8%, and 2.6% on the benchmark datasets PudMed 200K RCT, PudMed 20K RCT and NICTA-PIBOSO, respectively. This indicates the significant impact of improving sentence representation on boosting model performance.
This paper investigates the potential benefits of language-specific fact-checking models, focusing on the case of Chinese. We first demonstrate the limitations of translation-based methods and multilingual large language models (e.g., GPT-4), highlighting the need for language-specific systems. We further propose a Chinese fact-checking system that can better retrieve evidence from a document by incorporating context information. To better analyze token-level biases in different systems, we construct an adversarial dataset based on the CHEF dataset, where each instance has large word overlap with the original one but holds the opposite veracity label. Experimental results on the CHEF dataset and our adversarial dataset show that our proposed method outperforms translation-based methods and multilingual LLMs and is more robust toward biases, while there is still large room for improvement, emphasizing the importance of language-specific fact-checking systems.
The automation of resume screening is a crucial aspect of the recruitment process in organizations. Automated resume screening systems often encompass a range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. This paper introduces a novel Large Language Models (LLMs) based agent framework for resume screening, aimed at enhancing efficiency and time management in recruitment processes. Our framework is distinct in its ability to efficiently summarize and grade each resume from a large dataset. Moreover, it utilizes LLM agents for decision-making. To evaluate our framework, we constructed a dataset from actual resumes and simulated a resume screening process. Subsequently, the outcomes of the simulation experiment were compared and subjected to detailed analysis. The results demonstrate that our automated resume screening framework is 11 times faster than traditional manual methods. Furthermore, by fine-tuning the LLMs, we observed a significant improvement in the F1 score, reaching 87.73\%, during the resume sentence classification phase. In the resume summarization and grading phase, our fine-tuned model surpassed the baseline performance of the GPT-3.5 model. Analysis of the decision-making efficacy of the LLM agents in the final offer stage further underscores the potential of LLM agents in transforming resume screening processes.
Sentence classification is one of the basic tasks of natural language processing. Convolution neural network (CNN) has the ability to extract n-grams features through convolutional filters and capture local correlations between consecutive words in parallel, so CNN is a popular neural network architecture to dealing with the task. But restricted by the width of convolutional filters, it is difficult for CNN to capture long term contextual dependencies. Attention is a mechanism that considers global information and pays more attention to keywords in sentences, thus attention mechanism is cooperated with CNN network to improve performance in sentence classification task. In our work, we don't focus on keyword in a sentence, but on which CNN's output feature map is more important. We propose a Squeeze-and-Excitation Convolutional neural Network (SECNN) for sentence classification. SECNN takes the feature maps from multiple CNN as different channels of sentence representation, and then, we can utilize channel attention mechanism, that is SE attention mechanism, to enable the model to learn the attention weights of different channel features. The results show that our model achieves advanced performance in the sentence classification task.
Although large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capacity to leverage in-context demonstrations, it is still unclear to what extent they can learn new concepts or facts from ground-truth labels. To address this question, we examine the capacity of instruction-tuned LLMs to follow in-context concept guidelines for sentence labeling tasks. We design guidelines that present different types of factual and counterfactual concept definitions, which are used as prompts for zero-shot sentence classification tasks. Our results show that although concept definitions consistently help in task performance, only the larger models (with 70B parameters or more) have limited ability to work under counterfactual contexts. Importantly, only proprietary models such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 can recognize nonsensical guidelines, which we hypothesize is due to more sophisticated alignment methods. Finally, we find that Falcon-180B-chat is outperformed by Llama-2-70B-chat is most cases, which indicates that careful fine-tuning is more effective than increasing model scale. Altogether, our simple evaluation method reveals significant gaps in concept understanding between the most capable open-source language models and the leading proprietary APIs.
Aspect-based meeting transcript summarization aims to produce multiple summaries, each focusing on one aspect of content in a meeting transcript. It is challenging as sentences related to different aspects can mingle together, and those relevant to a specific aspect can be scattered throughout the long transcript of a meeting. The traditional summarization methods produce one summary mixing information of all aspects, which cannot deal with the above challenges of aspect-based meeting transcript summarization. In this paper, we propose a two-stage method for aspect-based meeting transcript summarization. To select the input content related to specific aspects, we train a sentence classifier on a dataset constructed from the AMI corpus with pseudo-labeling. Then we merge the sentences selected for a specific aspect as the input for the summarizer to produce the aspect-based summary. Experimental results on the AMI corpus outperform many strong baselines, which verifies the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Recent work has found that few-shot sentence classification based on pre-trained Sentence Encoders (SEs) is efficient, robust, and effective. In this work, we investigate strategies for domain-specialization in the context of few-shot sentence classification with SEs. We first establish that unsupervised Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training (DAPT) of a base Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) (i.e., not an SE) substantially improves the accuracy of few-shot sentence classification by up to 8.4 points. However, applying DAPT on SEs, on the one hand, disrupts the effects of their (general-domain) Sentence Embedding Pre-Training (SEPT). On the other hand, applying general-domain SEPT on top of a domain-adapted base PLM (i.e., after DAPT) is effective but inefficient, since the computationally expensive SEPT needs to be executed on top of a DAPT-ed PLM of each domain. As a solution, we propose AdaSent, which decouples SEPT from DAPT by training a SEPT adapter on the base PLM. The adapter can be inserted into DAPT-ed PLMs from any domain. We demonstrate AdaSent's effectiveness in extensive experiments on 17 different few-shot sentence classification datasets. AdaSent matches or surpasses the performance of full SEPT on DAPT-ed PLM, while substantially reducing the training costs. The code for AdaSent is available.
Large-scale language models achieved state-of-the-art performance over a number of language tasks. However, they fail on adversarial language examples, which are sentences optimized to fool the language models but with similar semantic meanings for humans. While prior work focuses on making the language model robust at training time, retraining for robustness is often unrealistic for large-scale foundation models. Instead, we propose to make the language models robust at test time. By dynamically adapting the input sentence with predictions from masked words, we show that we can reverse many language adversarial attacks. Since our approach does not require any training, it works for novel tasks at test time and can adapt to novel adversarial corruptions. Visualizations and empirical results on two popular sentence classification datasets demonstrate that our method can repair adversarial language attacks over 65% o
Learning sentence embeddings is a fundamental problem in natural language processing. While existing research primarily focuses on enhancing the quality of sentence embeddings, the exploration of sentence embedding dimensions is limited. Here we present a comprehensive and empirical analysis of the dimensionality of sentence embeddings. First, we demonstrate that the optimal dimension of sentence embeddings is usually smaller than the default value. Subsequently, to compress the dimension of sentence embeddings with minimum performance degradation, we identify two components contributing to the overall performance loss: the encoder's performance loss and the pooler's performance loss. Therefore, we propose a two-step training method for sentence representation learning models, wherein the encoder and the pooler are optimized separately to mitigate the overall performance loss in low-dimension scenarios. Experimental results on seven STS tasks and seven sentence classification tasks demonstrate that our method significantly improves the performance of low-dimensional sentence embeddings.
In this study, we propose to evaluate the use of deep learning methods for semantic classification at the sentence level to accelerate the process of corpus building in the field of humanities and linguistics, a traditional and time-consuming task. We introduce a novel corpus comprising around 2500 sentences spanning from 300 BCE to 900 CE including sexual semantics (medical, erotica, etc.). We evaluate various sentence classification approaches and different input embedding layers, and show that all consistently outperform simple token-based searches. We explore the integration of idiolectal and sociolectal metadata embeddings (centuries, author, type of writing), but find that it leads to overfitting. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, achieving high precision and true positive rates (TPR) of respectively 70.60% and 86.33% using HAN. We evaluate the impact of the dataset size on the model performances (420 instead of 2013), and show that, while our models perform worse, they still offer a high enough precision and TPR, even without MLM, respectively 69% and 51%. Given the result, we provide an analysis of the attention mechanism as a supporting added value for humanists in order to produce more data.
This paper describes the NOWJ1 Team's approach for the Automated Legal Question Answering Competition (ALQAC) 2023, which focuses on enhancing legal task performance by integrating classical statistical models and Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). For the document retrieval task, we implement a pre-processing step to overcome input limitations and apply learning-to-rank methods to consolidate features from various models. The question-answering task is split into two sub-tasks: sentence classification and answer extraction. We incorporate state-of-the-art models to develop distinct systems for each sub-task, utilizing both classic statistical models and pre-trained Language Models. Experimental results demonstrate the promising potential of our proposed methodology in the competition.
Information extraction(IE) is a crucial subfield within natural language processing. However, for the traditionally segmented approach to sentence classification and Named Entity Recognition, the intricate interactions between these individual subtasks remain largely uninvestigated. In this study, we propose an integrative analysis, converging sentence classification with Named Entity Recognition, with the objective to unveil and comprehend the mutual reinforcement effect within these two information extraction subtasks. To achieve this, we introduce a Sentence Classification and Named Entity Recognition Multi-task (SCNM) approach that combines Sentence Classification (SC) and Named Entity Recognition (NER). We develop a Sentence-to-Label Generation (SLG) framework for SCNM and construct a Wikipedia dataset containing both SC and NER. Using a format converter, we unify input formats and employ a generative model to generate SC-labels, NER-labels, and associated text segments. We propose a Constraint Mechanism (CM) to improve generated format accuracy. Our results show SC accuracy increased by 1.13 points and NER by 1.06 points in SCNM compared to standalone tasks, with CM raising format accuracy from 63.61 to 100. The findings indicate mutual reinforcement effects between SC and NER, and integration enhances both tasks' performance. We additionally implemented the SLG framework on single SC task. It yielded superior accuracies compared to the baseline on two distinct Japanese SC datasets. Notably, in the experiment of few-shot learning, SLG framework shows much better performance than fine-tune method. These empirical findings contribute additional evidence to affirm the efficacy of the SLG framework.
Information extraction(IE) is a crucial subfield within natural language processing. In this study, we introduce a Sentence Classification and Named Entity Recognition Multi-task (SCNM) approach that combines Sentence Classification (SC) and Named Entity Recognition (NER). We develop a Sentence-to-Label Generation (SLG) framework for SCNM and construct a Wikipedia dataset containing both SC and NER. Using a format converter, we unify input formats and employ a generative model to generate SC-labels, NER-labels, and associated text segments. We propose a Constraint Mechanism (CM) to improve generated format accuracy. Our results show SC accuracy increased by 1.13 points and NER by 1.06 points in SCNM compared to standalone tasks, with CM raising format accuracy from 63.61 to 100. The findings indicate mutual reinforcement effects between SC and NER, and integration enhances both tasks' performance.
Information extraction (IE), one of the main tasks of natural language processing (NLP), has recently increased importance in the use of resumes. In studies on the text to extract information from the CV, sentence classification was generally made using NLP models. In this study, it is aimed to extract information by classifying all of the text groups after pre-processing such as Optical Character Recognition (OCT) and object recognition with the YOLOv8 model of the resumes. The text dataset consists of 286 resumes collected for 5 different (education, experience, talent, personal and language) job descriptions in the IT industry. The dataset created for object recognition consists of 1198 resumes, which were collected from the open-source internet and labeled as sets of text. BERT, BERT-t, DistilBERT, RoBERTa and XLNet were used as models. F1 score variances were used to compare the model results. In addition, the YOLOv8 model has also been reported comparatively in itself. As a result of the comparison, DistilBERT was showed better results despite having a lower number of parameters than other models.
In comparative linguistics, colexification refers to the phenomenon of a lexical form conveying two or more distinct meanings. Existing work on colexification patterns relies on annotated word lists, limiting scalability and usefulness in NLP. In contrast, we identify colexification patterns of more than 2,000 concepts across 1,335 languages directly from an unannotated parallel corpus. We then propose simple and effective methods to build multilingual graphs from the colexification patterns: ColexNet and ColexNet+. ColexNet's nodes are concepts and its edges are colexifications. In ColexNet+, concept nodes are additionally linked through intermediate nodes, each representing an ngram in one of 1,334 languages. We use ColexNet+ to train $\overrightarrow{\mbox{ColexNet+}}$, high-quality multilingual embeddings that are well-suited for transfer learning. In our experiments, we first show that ColexNet achieves high recall on CLICS, a dataset of crosslingual colexifications. We then evaluate $\overrightarrow{\mbox{ColexNet+}}$ on roundtrip translation, sentence retrieval and sentence classification and show that our embeddings surpass several transfer learning baselines. This demonstrates the benefits of using colexification as a source of information in multilingual NLP.
Recent studies have exhibited remarkable capabilities of pre-trained multilingual Transformers, especially cross-lingual transferability. However, current methods do not measure cross-lingual transferability well, hindering the understanding of multilingual Transformers. In this paper, we propose IGap, a cross-lingual transferability metric for multilingual Transformers on sentence classification tasks. IGap takes training error into consideration, and can also estimate transferability without end-task data. Experimental results show that IGap outperforms baseline metrics for transferability measuring and transfer direction ranking. Besides, we conduct extensive systematic experiments where we compare transferability among various multilingual Transformers, fine-tuning algorithms, and transfer directions. More importantly, our results reveal three findings about cross-lingual transfer, which helps us to better understand multilingual Transformers.
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a cornerstone NLP task while its robustness has been given little attention. This paper rethinks the principles of NER attacks derived from sentence classification, as they can easily violate the label consistency between the original and adversarial NER examples. This is due to the fine-grained nature of NER, as even minor word changes in the sentence can result in the emergence or mutation of any entities, resulting in invalid adversarial examples. To this end, we propose a novel one-word modification NER attack based on a key insight, NER models are always vulnerable to the boundary position of an entity to make their decision. We thus strategically insert a new boundary into the sentence and trigger the Entity Boundary Interference that the victim model makes the wrong prediction either on this boundary word or on other words in the sentence. We call this attack Virtual Boundary Attack (ViBA), which is shown to be remarkably effective when attacking both English and Chinese models with a 70%-90% attack success rate on state-of-the-art language models (e.g. RoBERTa, DeBERTa) and also significantly faster than previous methods.
Training and inference on edge devices often requires an efficient setup due to computational limitations. While pre-computing data representations and caching them on a server can mitigate extensive edge device computation, this leads to two challenges. First, the amount of storage required on the server that scales linearly with the number of instances. Second, the bandwidth required to send extensively large amounts of data to an edge device. To reduce the memory footprint of pre-computed data representations, we propose a simple, yet effective approach that uses randomly initialized hyperplane projections. To further reduce their size by up to 98.96%, we quantize the resulting floating-point representations into binary vectors. Despite the greatly reduced size, we show that the embeddings remain effective for training models across various English and German sentence classification tasks that retain 94%--99% of their floating-point.
The emerging classical-quantum transfer learning paradigm has brought a decent performance to quantum computational models in many tasks, such as computer vision, by enabling a combination of quantum models and classical pre-trained neural networks. However, using quantum computing with pre-trained models has yet to be explored in natural language processing (NLP). Due to the high linearity constraints of the underlying quantum computing infrastructures, existing Quantum NLP models are limited in performance on real tasks. We fill this gap by pre-training a sentence state with complex-valued BERT-like architecture, and adapting it to the classical-quantum transfer learning scheme for sentence classification. On quantum simulation experiments, the pre-trained representation can bring 50\% to 60\% increases to the capacity of end-to-end quantum models.
In this report, we describe our ClassBases submissions to a shared task on multilingual protest event detection. For the multilingual protest news detection, we participated in subtask-1, subtask-2, and subtask-4, which are document classification, sentence classification, and token classification. In subtask-1, we compare XLM-RoBERTa-base, mLUKE-base, and XLM-RoBERTa-large on finetuning in a sequential classification setting. We always use a combination of the training data from every language provided to train our multilingual models. We found that larger models seem to work better and entity knowledge helps but at a non-negligible cost. For subtask-2, we only submitted an mLUKE-base system for sentence classification. For subtask-4, we only submitted an XLM-RoBERTa-base for token classification system for sequence labeling. For automatically replicating manually created event datasets, we participated in COVID-related protest events from the New York Times news corpus. We created a system to process the crawled data into a dataset of protest events.