Thailand

We present a synthetic data approach for instruction-tuning large language models (LLMs) for low-resource languages in a data-efficient manner, specifically focusing on Thai. We identify three key properties that contribute to the effectiveness of instruction-tuning datasets: fluency, diversity, and cultural context. We propose a seed-data-free framework for generating synthetic instruction-tuning data that incorporates these essential properties. Our framework employs an LLM to generate diverse topics, retrieve relevant contexts from Wikipedia, and create instructions for various tasks, such as question answering, summarization, and conversation. The experimental results show that our best-performing synthetic dataset, which incorporates all three key properties, achieves competitive performance using only 5,000 instructions when compared to state-of-the-art Thai LLMs trained on hundreds of thousands of instructions.

ACL 2024

Seed-Free Synthetic Data Generation Framework for Instruction-Tuning LLMs: A Case Study in Thai

instruction finetuning

synthetic data generation

large language models

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
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Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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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.

Identifying beneficial tasks to transfer from is a crucial step toward successful transfer learning in the paradigm of intermediate-task transfer learning. In this work, we experiment on 130 source-target task combinations and demonstrate that the transfer performance exhibits severe variance across different source tasks and training seeds, highlighting the crucial role of intermediate-task selection in a broader context. We compare four representative task selection methods in a unified setup, focusing on their effectiveness and consistency. Compared to embedding-free methods and text embeddings, task embeddings constructed from fine-tuned weights can better estimate task transferability by improving task prediction accuracy from 2.59\% to 3.96\%. Despite its strong performance, we observe that the task embeddings do not consistently demonstrate superiority for tasks requiring reasoning abilities. Furthermore, we introduce a novel method that measures pairwise token similarity using maximum inner product search, leading to the highest performance in task-transfer prediction. Our findings suggest that token-wise similarity is better predictive for predicting transferability compared to averaging weights.

Exploring the Effectiveness and Consistency of Task Selection in Intermediate-Task Transfer Learning

Deep semantic representations are useful for many NLU tasks (Droganova and Zeman 2019; Schuster and Manning-2016). Manual annotation to build these representations is time-consuming, and so automatic approaches are preferred (Droganova and Zeman 2019; Bender et al. 2015). This paper demonstrates how rich semantic representations can be automatically derived for Thai Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs), where the semantic relationship between component verbs is not immediately clear from the surface forms. I present the first fully-implemented HPSG analysis for Thai SVCs, deriving appropriate semantic representations (MRS; Copestake et al. 2005) from syntactic features, implemented within a DELPH-IN computational grammar (Slayden 2009). This analysis increases verified coverage of SVCs by 73% and decreases ambiguity by 46%. The final grammar can be found at: https://bit.ly/3yJRTBJ

Automatic Derivation of Semantic Representations for Thai Serial Verb Constructions: A Grammar-Based Approach

This study investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) and GPT-2 (Radford et al., 2019), engage in pragmatic inference of scalar implicature, such as some. Two sets of experiments were conducted using cosine similarity and next sentence prediction as experimental methods. The results in experiment 1 showed that, in the absence of context, both models interpret some as pragmatic implicature not all, aligning with human language processing. In experiment 2, in which Question Under Discussion (QUD) was presented as a contextual cue, GPT-2 encountered processing difficulties since a certain type of QUD required pragmatic inference for implicature. Conversely, BERT exhibited consistent performance regardless of types of the QUDs. In theoretical approaches, BERT inherently incorporates pragmatic implicature not all within the term some, adhering to a Default model (Levinson, 2000). In contrast, GPT-2 seems to expend processing effort in inferring pragmatic implicature within context, consistent with a Context-driven model (Sperber and Wilson, 2002).

Pragmatic inference of scalar implicature by LLMs

As conventional topic models rely on word co-occurrence to infer latent topics, topic modeling for short texts has been a long-standing challenge. Large Language Models (LLMs) can potentially overcome this challenge by contextually learning the semantics of words via pretraining. This paper studies two approaches, parallel prompting and sequential prompting, to use LLMs for topic modeling. Due to the input length limitations, LLMs cannot process many texts at once. By splitting the texts into smaller subsets and processing them parallelly or sequentially, an arbitrary number of texts can be handled by LLMs. Experimental results demonstrated that our methods can identify more coherent topics than existing ones while maintaining the diversity of the induced topics. Furthermore, we found that the inferred topics adequately covered the input texts, while hallucinated topics were hardly generated.

Topic Modeling for Short Texts with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel in various tasks but are primarily trained on text data, limiting their application scope. Expanding LLM capabilities to include vision-language understanding is vital, yet training them on multimodal data from scratch is challenging and costly. Existing instruction tuning methods, e.g., LLAVA, often connects a pretrained CLIP vision encoder and LLMs via fully fine-tuning LLMs to bridge the modality gap. However, full fine-tuning is plagued by catastrophic forgetting, i.e., forgetting previous knowledge, and high training costs particularly in the era of increasing tasks and modalities. To solve this issue, we introduce MoExtend, an effective framework designed to streamline the modality adaptation and extension of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. MoExtend seamlessly integrates new experts into pre-trained MoE models, endowing them with novel knowledge without the need to tune pretrained models such as MoE and vision encoders. This approach enables rapid adaptation and extension to new modal data or tasks, effectively addressing the challenge of accommodating new modalities within LLMs. Furthermore, MoExtend avoids tuning pretrained models, thus mitigating the risk of catastrophic forgetting. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of MoExtend in enhancing the multimodal capabilities of LLMs, contributing to advancements in multimodal AI research.

MoExtend: Tuning New Experts for Modality and Task Extension

Collaborative argumentation holds significant potential for enhancing students' learning outcomes within classroom settings. Consequently, researchers have explored the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically analyze argumentation in these contexts. Despite the remarkable performance of deep learning models in this task, their lack of interpretability poses a critical challenge, leading to teachers' skepticism and limited utilization. To cultivate trust among teachers, this PhD thesis proposal aims to leverage explainable AI techniques to provide explanations for these deep learning models. Specifically, the study develops two deep learning models for automated analysis of argument moves (claim, evidence, and warrant) and specificity levels (low, medium, and high) within collaborative argumentation. To address the interpretability issue, four explainable AI methods are proposed: gradient sensitivity, gradient input, integrated gradient, and LIME. Computational experiments demonstrate the efficacy of these methods in elucidating model predictions by computing word contributions, with LIME delivering exceptional performance. Moreover, a quasi-experiment is designed to evaluate the impact of model explanations on user trust and knowledge, serving as a future study of this PhD proposal. By tackling the challenges of interpretability and trust, this PhD thesis proposal aims to contribute to fostering user trust in AI and facilitating the practical implementation of AI in educational contexts.

On the Interpretability of Deep Learning Models for Collaborative Argumentation Analysis in Classrooms

Acquiring large-scale parallel corpora is crucial for NLP tasks such as Neural Machine Translation, and web crawling has become a popular methodology for this purpose. Previous studies have been conducted based on sentence unit division (SUD) when aligning documents in various languages which are obtained through web crawling. Among them, the TK-PERT method achieved state-of-the-art results and well addressed the boilerplate text in web crawling data through a down-weighting approach. However, there remains a problem about how to better handle long-text encoding. Thus, we introduce the strategy of Overlapping Fixed-Length Segmentation (OFLS) in place of SUD, and observe a pronounced enhancement when performing the same approach for document alignment. In this paper, we compare the SUD and OFLS using three previous methods, Mean-Pool, TK-PERT, and Optimal Transport, on the WMT16 document alignment shared task for French-English, as well as on our self-established Japanese-English dataset MnRN. As a result, for the WMT16 task, various SUD based methods showed an increase in recall by 1\% ~ 10\% after reproduction with OFLS. For MnRN data, OFLS demonstrated significant improvements in accuracy and also exhibited faster document embedding speed.

Document Alignment based on Overlapping Fixed-Length Segments

Providing example sentences that are diverse and aligned with learners' proficiency levels is essential for fostering effective language acquisition. This study examines the use of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to produce example sentences targeting L2 Japanese learners. We utilize PLMs in two ways: as quality scoring components in a retrieval system that draws from a newly curated corpus of Japanese sentences, and as direct sentence generators using zero-shot learning. We evaluate the quality of sentences by considering multiple aspects such as difficulty, diversity, and naturalness, with a panel of raters consisting of learners of Japanese, native speakers -- and GPT-4. Our findings suggest that there is inherent disagreement among participants on the ratings of sentence qualities, except for difficulty. Despite that, the retrieval approach was preferred by all evaluators, especially for beginner and advanced target proficiency, while the generative approaches received lower scores on average. Even so, our experiments highlight the potential for using PLMs to enhance the adaptability of sentence suggestion systems and therefore improve the language learning journey.

Automatically Suggesting Diverse Example Sentences for L2 Japanese Learners Using Pre-Trained Language Models

Coreference Resolution (CR) and Zero Pronoun Resolution (ZPR) are vital for extracting meaningful information from text. However, limited research and datasets pose significant challenges in Thai language. To address this, we developed an annotated joint CR and ZPR dataset. Additionally, we introduced the Z-coref model, capable of simultaneously handling CR and ZPR tasks by adjusting the span definition of a prior CR architecture to include token gaps. The proposed model trained on our dataset outperformed the state-of-the-art in resolving both coreference resolution and zero-pronoun resolution, while taking less time to train.

Z-coref: Thai Coreference and Zero Pronoun Resolution

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significant potential for facilitating intelligent end-user applications in healthcare. However, hallucinations remain an inherent problem with LLMs, making it crucial to address this issue with extensive medical knowledge and data. In this work, we propose a Retrieve-and-Medically-Augmented-Generation with Knowledge Reduction (ReMAG-KR) pipeline, employing a carefully curated knowledge base using cross-encoder re-ranking strategies. The pipeline is tested on medical MCQ-based QA datasets as well as general QA datasets. It was observed that when the knowledge base is reduced, the model's performance decreases by 2-8%, while the inference time improves by 47%.

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Exploring the Effectiveness and Consistency of Task Selection in Intermediate-Task Transfer Learning

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