Daily Papers

Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have shown promising performance on a variety of recognition tasks using the standard zero-shot classification procedure -- computing similarity between the query image and the embedded words for each category. By only using the category name, they neglect to make use of the rich context of additional information that language affords. The procedure gives no intermediate understanding of why a category is chosen, and furthermore provides no mechanism for adjusting the criteria used towards this decision. We present an alternative framework for classification with VLMs, which we call classification by description. We ask VLMs to check for descriptive features rather than broad categories: to find a tiger, look for its stripes; its claws; and more. By basing decisions on these descriptors, we can provide additional cues that encourage using the features we want to be used. In the process, we can get a clear idea of what features the model uses to construct its decision; it gains some level of inherent explainability. We query large language models (e.g., GPT-3) for these descriptors to obtain them in a scalable way. Extensive experiments show our framework has numerous advantages past interpretability. We show improvements in accuracy on ImageNet across distribution shifts; demonstrate the ability to adapt VLMs to recognize concepts unseen during training; and illustrate how descriptors can be edited to effectively mitigate bias compared to the baseline.

Automated diagnosis prediction from medical images is a valuable resource to support clinical decision-making. However, such systems usually need to be trained on large amounts of annotated data, which often is scarce in the medical domain. Zero-shot methods address this challenge by allowing a flexible adaption to new settings with different clinical findings without relying on labeled data. Further, to integrate automated diagnosis in the clinical workflow, methods should be transparent and explainable, increasing medical professionals' trust and facilitating correctness verification. In this work, we introduce Xplainer, a novel framework for explainable zero-shot diagnosis in the clinical setting. Xplainer adapts the classification-by-description approach of contrastive vision-language models to the multi-label medical diagnosis task. Specifically, instead of directly predicting a diagnosis, we prompt the model to classify the existence of descriptive observations, which a radiologist would look for on an X-Ray scan, and use the descriptor probabilities to estimate the likelihood of a diagnosis. Our model is explainable by design, as the final diagnosis prediction is directly based on the prediction of the underlying descriptors. We evaluate Xplainer on two chest X-ray datasets, CheXpert and ChestX-ray14, and demonstrate its effectiveness in improving the performance and explainability of zero-shot diagnosis. Our results suggest that Xplainer provides a more detailed understanding of the decision-making process and can be a valuable tool for clinical diagnosis.

The zero-shot performance of existing vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP is limited by the availability of large-scale, aligned image and text datasets in specific domains. In this work, we leverage two complementary sources of information -- descriptions of categories generated by large language models (LLMs) and abundant, fine-grained image classification datasets -- to improve the zero-shot classification performance of VLMs across fine-grained domains. On the technical side, we develop methods to train VLMs with this "bag-level" image-text supervision. We find that simply using these attributes at test-time does not improve performance, but our training strategy, for example, on the iNaturalist dataset, leads to an average improvement of 4-5% in zero-shot classification accuracy for novel categories of birds and flowers. Similar improvements are observed in domains where a subset of the categories was used to fine-tune the model. By prompting LLMs in various ways, we generate descriptions that capture visual appearance, habitat, and geographic regions and pair them with existing attributes such as the taxonomic structure of the categories. We systematically evaluate their ability to improve zero-shot categorization in natural domains. Our findings suggest that geographic priors can be just as effective and are complementary to visual appearance. Our method also outperforms prior work on prompt-based tuning of VLMs. We release the benchmark, consisting of 14 datasets at https://github.com/cvl-umass/AdaptCLIPZS , which will contribute to future research in zero-shot recognition.

Accurately describing images via text is a foundation of explainable AI. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have recently addressed this by aligning images and texts in a shared embedding space, expressing semantic similarities between vision and language embeddings. VLM classification can be improved with descriptions generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). However, it is difficult to determine the contribution of actual description semantics, as the performance gain may also stem from a semantic-agnostic ensembling effect. Considering this, we ask how to distinguish the actual discriminative power of descriptions from performance boosts that potentially rely on an ensembling effect. To study this, we propose an alternative evaluation scenario that shows a characteristic behavior if the used descriptions have discriminative power. Furthermore, we propose a training-free method to select discriminative descriptions that work independently of classname ensembling effects. The training-free method works in the following way: A test image has a local CLIP label neighborhood, i.e., its top-k label predictions. Then, w.r.t. to a small selection set, we extract descriptions that distinguish each class well in the local neighborhood. Using the selected descriptions, we demonstrate improved classification accuracy across seven datasets and provide in-depth analysis and insights into the explainability of description-based image classification by VLMs.

Large language models have improved zero-shot text classification by allowing the transfer of semantic knowledge from the training data in order to classify among specific label sets in downstream tasks. We propose a simple way to further improve zero-shot accuracies with minimal effort. We curate small finetuning datasets intended to describe the labels for a task. Unlike typical finetuning data, which has texts annotated with labels, our data simply describes the labels in language, e.g., using a few related terms, dictionary/encyclopedia entries, and short templates. Across a range of topic and sentiment datasets, our method is more accurate than zero-shot by 15-17% absolute. It is also more robust to choices required for zero-shot classification, such as patterns for prompting the model to classify and mappings from labels to tokens in the model's vocabulary. Furthermore, since our data merely describes the labels but does not use input texts, finetuning on it yields a model that performs strongly on multiple text domains for a given label set, even improving over few-shot out-of-domain classification in multiple settings.

CLIP, as a foundational vision language model, is widely used in zero-shot image classification due to its ability to understand various visual concepts and natural language descriptions. However, how to fully leverage CLIP's unprecedented human-like understanding capabilities to achieve better zero-shot classification is still an open question. This paper draws inspiration from the human visual perception process: a modern neuroscience view suggests that in classifying an object, humans first infer its class-independent attributes (e.g., background and orientation) which help separate the foreground object from the background, and then make decisions based on this information. Inspired by this, we observe that providing CLIP with contextual attributes improves zero-shot classification and mitigates reliance on spurious features. We also observe that CLIP itself can reasonably infer the attributes from an image. With these observations, we propose a training-free, two-step zero-shot classification method named PerceptionCLIP. Given an image, it first infers contextual attributes (e.g., background) and then performs object classification conditioning on them. Our experiments show that PerceptionCLIP achieves better generalization, group robustness, and better interpretability. For example, PerceptionCLIP with ViT-L/14 improves the worst group accuracy by 16.5% on the Waterbirds dataset and by 3.5% on CelebA.

A promising approach for improving the performance of vision-language models like CLIP for image classification is to extend the class descriptions (i.e., prompts) with related attributes, e.g., using brown sparrow instead of sparrow. However, current zero-shot methods select a subset of attributes regardless of commonalities between the target classes, potentially providing no useful information that would have helped to distinguish between them. For instance, they may use color instead of bill shape to distinguish between sparrows and wrens, which are both brown. We propose Follow-up Differential Descriptions (FuDD), a zero-shot approach that tailors the class descriptions to each dataset and leads to additional attributes that better differentiate the target classes. FuDD first identifies the ambiguous classes for each image, and then uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate new class descriptions that differentiate between them. The new class descriptions resolve the initial ambiguity and help predict the correct label. In our experiments, FuDD consistently outperforms generic description ensembles and naive LLM-generated descriptions on 12 datasets. We show that differential descriptions are an effective tool to resolve class ambiguities, which otherwise significantly degrade the performance. We also show that high quality natural language class descriptions produced by FuDD result in comparable performance to few-shot adaptation methods.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are gaining traction for their remarkable ability to process and integrate visual and textual data. Despite their popularity, the capacity of LVLMs to generate precise, fine-grained textual descriptions has not been fully explored. This study addresses this gap by focusing on distinctiveness and fidelity, assessing how models like Open-Flamingo, IDEFICS, and MiniGPT-4 can distinguish between similar objects and accurately describe visual features. We proposed the Textual Retrieval-Augmented Classification (TRAC) framework, which, by leveraging its generative capabilities, allows us to delve deeper into analyzing fine-grained visual description generation. This research provides valuable insights into the generation quality of LVLMs, enhancing the understanding of multimodal language models. Notably, MiniGPT-4 stands out for its better ability to generate fine-grained descriptions, outperforming the other two models in this aspect. The code is provided at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Explore_FGVDs-E277.

We present an elegant and effective approach for addressing limitations in existing multi-label classification models by incorporating interaction matching, a concept shown to be useful for ad-hoc search result ranking. By performing soft n-gram interaction matching, we match labels with natural language descriptions (which are common to have in most multi-labeling tasks). Our approach can be used to enhance existing multi-label classification approaches, which are biased toward frequently-occurring labels. We evaluate our approach on two challenging tasks: automatic medical coding of clinical notes and automatic labeling of entities from software tutorial text. Our results show that our method can yield up to an 11% relative improvement in macro performance, with most of the gains stemming labels that appear infrequently in the training set (i.e., the long tail of labels).

Large pre-trained language models (LMs) such as GPT-3 have acquired a surprising ability to perform zero-shot learning. For example, to classify sentiment without any training examples, we can "prompt" the LM with the review and the label description "Does the user like this movie?", and ask whether the next word is "yes" or "no". However, the next word prediction training objective is still misaligned with the target zero-shot learning objective. To address this weakness, we propose meta-tuning, which directly optimizes the zero-shot learning objective by fine-tuning pre-trained language models on a collection of datasets. We focus on classification tasks, and construct the meta-dataset by aggregating 43 existing datasets and annotating 441 label descriptions in a question-answering (QA) format. When evaluated on unseen tasks, meta-tuned models outperform a same-sized QA model and the previous SOTA zero-shot learning system based on natural language inference. Additionally, increasing parameter count from 220M to 770M improves AUC-ROC scores by 6.3%, and we forecast that even larger models would perform better. Therefore, measuring zero-shot learning performance on language models out-of-the-box might underestimate their true potential, and community-wide efforts on aggregating datasets and unifying their formats can help build models that answer prompts better.

Despite an exciting new wave of multimodal machine learning models, current approaches still struggle to interpret the complex contextual relationships between the different modalities present in videos. Going beyond existing methods that emphasize simple activities or objects, we propose a new model-agnostic approach for generating detailed textual descriptions that captures multimodal video information. Our method leverages the extensive knowledge learnt by large language models, such as GPT-3.5 or Llama2, to reason about textual descriptions of the visual and aural modalities, obtained from BLIP-2, Whisper and ImageBind. Without needing additional finetuning of video-text models or datasets, we demonstrate that available LLMs have the ability to use these multimodal textual descriptions as proxies for ``sight'' or ``hearing'' and perform zero-shot multimodal classification of videos in-context. Our evaluations on popular action recognition benchmarks, such as UCF-101 or Kinetics, show these context-rich descriptions can be successfully used in video understanding tasks. This method points towards a promising new research direction in multimodal classification, demonstrating how an interplay between textual, visual and auditory machine learning models can enable more holistic video understanding.

Neural image classifiers can often learn to make predictions by overly relying on non-predictive features that are spuriously correlated with the class labels in the training data. This leads to poor performance in real-world atypical scenarios where such features are absent. Supplementing the training dataset with images without such spurious features can aid robust learning against spurious correlations via better generalization. This paper presents ASPIRE (Language-guided data Augmentation for SPurIous correlation REmoval), a simple yet effective solution for expanding the training dataset with synthetic images without spurious features. ASPIRE, guided by language, generates these images without requiring any form of additional supervision or existing examples. Precisely, we employ LLMs to first extract foreground and background features from textual descriptions of an image, followed by advanced language-guided image editing to discover the features that are spuriously correlated with the class label. Finally, we personalize a text-to-image generation model to generate diverse in-domain images without spurious features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ASPIRE on 4 datasets, including the very challenging Hard ImageNet dataset, and 9 baselines and show that ASPIRE improves the classification accuracy of prior methods by 1% - 38%. Code soon at: https://github.com/Sreyan88/ASPIRE.

A central notion in practical and theoretical machine learning is that of a weak learner, classifiers that achieve better-than-random performance (on any given distribution over data), even by a small margin. Such weak learners form the practical basis for canonical machine learning methods such as boosting. In this work, we illustrate that prompt-based large language models can operate effectively as said weak learners. Specifically, we illustrate the use of a large language model (LLM) as a weak learner in a boosting algorithm applied to tabular data. We show that by providing (properly sampled according to the distribution of interest) text descriptions of tabular data samples, LLMs can produce a summary of the samples that serves as a template for classification and achieves the aim of acting as a weak learner on this task. We incorporate these models into a boosting approach, which in some settings can leverage the knowledge within the LLM to outperform traditional tree-based boosting. The model outperforms both few-shot learning and occasionally even more involved fine-tuning procedures, particularly for tasks involving small numbers of data points. The results illustrate the potential for prompt-based LLMs to function not just as few-shot learners themselves, but as components of larger machine learning pipelines.

We introduce CLaMP: Contrastive Language-Music Pre-training, which learns cross-modal representations between natural language and symbolic music using a music encoder and a text encoder trained jointly with a contrastive loss. To pre-train CLaMP, we collected a large dataset of 1.4 million music-text pairs. It employed text dropout as a data augmentation technique and bar patching to efficiently represent music data which reduces sequence length to less than 10%. In addition, we developed a masked music model pre-training objective to enhance the music encoder's comprehension of musical context and structure. CLaMP integrates textual information to enable semantic search and zero-shot classification for symbolic music, surpassing the capabilities of previous models. To support the evaluation of semantic search and music classification, we publicly release WikiMusicText (WikiMT), a dataset of 1010 lead sheets in ABC notation, each accompanied by a title, artist, genre, and description. In comparison to state-of-the-art models that require fine-tuning, zero-shot CLaMP demonstrated comparable or superior performance on score-oriented datasets.

In the era of foundation models, CLIP has emerged as a powerful tool for aligning text and visual modalities into a common embedding space. However, the alignment objective used to train CLIP often results in subpar visual features for fine-grained tasks. In contrast, SSL-pretrained models like DINO excel at extracting rich visual features due to their specialized training paradigm. Yet, these SSL models require an additional supervised linear probing step, which relies on fully labeled data which is often expensive and difficult to obtain at scale. In this paper, we propose a label-free prompt-tuning method that leverages the rich visual features of self-supervised learning models (DINO) and the broad textual knowledge of large language models (LLMs) to largely enhance CLIP-based image classification performance using unlabeled images. Our approach unfolds in three key steps: (1) We generate robust textual feature embeddings that more accurately represent object classes by leveraging class-specific descriptions from LLMs, enabling more effective zero-shot classification compared to CLIP's default name-specific prompts. (2) These textual embeddings are then used to produce pseudo-labels to train an alignment module that integrates the complementary strengths of LLM description-based textual embeddings and DINO's visual features. (3) Finally, we prompt-tune CLIP's vision encoder through DINO-assisted supervision using the trained alignment module. This three-step process allows us to harness the best of visual and textual foundation models, resulting in a powerful and efficient approach that surpasses state-of-the-art label-free classification methods. Notably, our framework, NoLA (No Labels Attached), achieves an average absolute gain of 3.6% over the state-of-the-art LaFter across 11 diverse image classification datasets.

In this paper, we aim to generate text classification data given arbitrary class definitions (i.e., user instruction), so one can train a small text classifier without any human annotation or raw corpus. Compared with pioneer attempts, our proposed Incubator is the first framework that can handle complicated and even mutually dependent classes (e.g., "TED Talk given by Educator" and "Other"). Specifically, Incubator is an LLM firstly tuned on the instruction-to-data mappings that we obtained from classification datasets and descriptions on HuggingFace together with in-context augmentation by GPT-4. We then refine Incubator by learning on the cluster centers of semantic textual embeddings to emphasize the uniformity and semantic diversity in generations. We compare Incubator on various classification tasks with strong baselines such as direct LLM-based inference and training data generation by prompt engineering. Experiments show Incubator is able to (1) perform well on traditional benchmarks, (2) take label dependency and user preference into consideration, and (3) enable logical text mining by incubating multiple classifiers.

Open-vocabulary audio-language models, like CLAP, offer a promising approach for zero-shot audio classification (ZSAC) by enabling classification with any arbitrary set of categories specified with natural language prompts. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method to improve ZSAC with CLAP. Specifically, we shift from the conventional method of using prompts with abstract category labels (e.g., Sound of an organ) to prompts that describe sounds using their inherent descriptive features in a diverse context (e.g.,The organ's deep and resonant tones filled the cathedral.). To achieve this, we first propose ReCLAP, a CLAP model trained with rewritten audio captions for improved understanding of sounds in the wild. These rewritten captions describe each sound event in the original caption using their unique discriminative characteristics. ReCLAP outperforms all baselines on both multi-modal audio-text retrieval and ZSAC. Next, to improve zero-shot audio classification with ReCLAP, we propose prompt augmentation. In contrast to the traditional method of employing hand-written template prompts, we generate custom prompts for each unique label in the dataset. These custom prompts first describe the sound event in the label and then employ them in diverse scenes. Our proposed method improves ReCLAP's performance on ZSAC by 1%-18% and outperforms all baselines by 1% - 55%.

Image copy detection is an important task for content moderation. We introduce SSCD, a model that builds on a recent self-supervised contrastive training objective. We adapt this method to the copy detection task by changing the architecture and training objective, including a pooling operator from the instance matching literature, and adapting contrastive learning to augmentations that combine images. Our approach relies on an entropy regularization term, promoting consistent separation between descriptor vectors, and we demonstrate that this significantly improves copy detection accuracy. Our method produces a compact descriptor vector, suitable for real-world web scale applications. Statistical information from a background image distribution can be incorporated into the descriptor. On the recent DISC2021 benchmark, SSCD is shown to outperform both baseline copy detection models and self-supervised architectures designed for image classification by huge margins, in all settings. For example, SSCD out-performs SimCLR descriptors by 48% absolute. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/sscd-copy-detection.

Few-shot classification involves identifying new categories using a limited number of labeled samples. Current few-shot classification methods based on local descriptors primarily leverage underlying consistent features across visible and invisible classes, facing challenges including redundant neighboring information, noisy representations, and limited interpretability. This paper proposes a Feature Aligning Few-shot Learning Method Using Local Descriptors Weighted Rules (FAFD-LDWR). It innovatively introduces a cross-normalization method into few-shot image classification to preserve the discriminative information of local descriptors as much as possible; and enhances classification performance by aligning key local descriptors of support and query sets to remove background noise. FAFD-LDWR performs excellently on three benchmark datasets , outperforming state-of-the-art methods in both 1-shot and 5-shot settings. The designed visualization experiments also demonstrate FAFD-LDWR's improvement in prediction interpretability.

The paper focuses on deep learning semantic search algorithms applied in the HR domain. The aim of the article is developing a novel approach to training a Siamese network to link the skills mentioned in the job ad with the title. It has been shown that the title normalization process can be based either on classification or similarity comparison approaches. While classification algorithms strive to classify a sample into predefined set of categories, similarity search algorithms take a more flexible approach, since they are designed to find samples that are similar to a given query sample, without requiring pre-defined classes and labels. In this article semantic similarity search to find candidates for title normalization has been used. A pre-trained language model has been adapted while teaching it to match titles and skills based on co-occurrence information. For the purpose of this research fifty billion title-descriptions pairs had been collected for training the model and thirty three thousand title-description-normalized title triplets, where normalized job title was picked up manually by job ad creator for testing purposes. As baselines FastText, BERT, SentenceBert and JobBert have been used. As a metric of the accuracy of the designed algorithm is Recall in top one, five and ten model's suggestions. It has been shown that the novel training objective lets it achieve significant improvement in comparison to other generic and specific text encoders. Two settings with treating titles as standalone strings, and with included skills as additional features during inference have been used and the results have been compared in this article. Improvements by 10% and 21.5% have been achieved using VacancySBERT and VacancySBERT (with skills) respectively. The benchmark has been developed as open-source to foster further research in the area.

Audio Description (AD) provides linguistic descriptions of movies and allows visually impaired people to follow a movie along with their peers. Such descriptions are by design mainly visual and thus naturally form an interesting data source for computer vision and computational linguistics. In this work we propose a novel dataset which contains transcribed ADs, which are temporally aligned to full length movies. In addition we also collected and aligned movie scripts used in prior work and compare the two sources of descriptions. In total the Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC) contains a parallel corpus of 118,114 sentences and video clips from 202 movies. First we characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for generating video descriptions. Comparing ADs to scripts, we find that ADs are indeed more visual and describe precisely what is shown rather than what should happen according to the scripts created prior to movie production. Furthermore, we present and compare the results of several teams who participated in a challenge organized in the context of the workshop "Describing and Understanding Video & The Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC)", at ICCV 2015.

Representation learning has been a critical topic in machine learning. In Click-through Rate Prediction, most features are represented as embedding vectors and learned simultaneously with other parameters in the model. With the development of CTR models, feature representation learning has become a trending topic and has been extensively studied by both industrial and academic researchers in recent years. This survey aims at summarizing the feature representation learning in a broader picture and pave the way for future research. To achieve such a goal, we first present a taxonomy of current research methods on feature representation learning following two main issues: (i) which feature to represent and (ii) how to represent these features. Then we give a detailed description of each method regarding these two issues. Finally, the review concludes with a discussion on the future directions of this field.

In this work we focus on fine-tuning a pre-trained BERT model and applying it to patent classification. When applied to large datasets of over two millions patents, our approach outperforms the state of the art by an approach using CNN with word embeddings. In addition, we focus on patent claims without other parts in patent documents. Our contributions include: (1) a new state-of-the-art method based on pre-trained BERT model and fine-tuning for patent classification, (2) a large dataset USPTO-3M at the CPC subclass level with SQL statements that can be used by future researchers, (3) showing that patent claims alone are sufficient for classification task, in contrast to conventional wisdom.

Deep learning methods have shown outstanding classification accuracy in medical imaging problems, which is largely attributed to the availability of large-scale datasets manually annotated with clean labels. However, given the high cost of such manual annotation, new medical imaging classification problems may need to rely on machine-generated noisy labels extracted from radiology reports. Indeed, many Chest X-ray (CXR) classifiers have already been modelled from datasets with noisy labels, but their training procedure is in general not robust to noisy-label samples, leading to sub-optimal models. Furthermore, CXR datasets are mostly multi-label, so current noisy-label learning methods designed for multi-class problems cannot be easily adapted. In this paper, we propose a new method designed for the noisy multi-label CXR learning, which detects and smoothly re-labels samples from the dataset, which is then used to train common multi-label classifiers. The proposed method optimises a bag of multi-label descriptors (BoMD) to promote their similarity with the semantic descriptors produced by BERT models from the multi-label image annotation. Our experiments on diverse noisy multi-label training sets and clean testing sets show that our model has state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness in many CXR multi-label classification benchmarks.

Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) is a natural language processing task with the objective to classify text documents into a set of classes from a structured class hierarchy. Many HTC approaches have been proposed which attempt to leverage the class hierarchy information in various ways to improve classification performance. Machine learning-based classification approaches require large amounts of training data and are most-commonly compared through three established benchmark datasets, which include the Web Of Science (WOS), Reuters Corpus Volume 1 Version 2 (RCV1-V2) and New York Times (NYT) datasets. However, apart from the RCV1-V2 dataset which is well-documented, these datasets are not accompanied with detailed description methodologies. In this paper, we introduce three new HTC benchmark datasets in the domain of research publications which comprise the titles and abstracts of papers from the Web of Science publication database. We first create two baseline datasets which use existing journal-and citation-based classification schemas. Due to the respective shortcomings of these two existing schemas, we propose an approach which combines their classifications to improve the reliability and robustness of the dataset. We evaluate the three created datasets with a clustering-based analysis and show that our proposed approach results in a higher quality dataset where documents that belong to the same class are semantically more similar compared to the other datasets. Finally, we provide the classification performance of four state-of-the-art HTC approaches on these three new datasets to provide baselines for future studies on machine learning-based techniques for scientific publication classification.

Text classification of unseen classes is a challenging Natural Language Processing task and is mainly attempted using two different types of approaches. Similarity-based approaches attempt to classify instances based on similarities between text document representations and class description representations. Zero-shot text classification approaches aim to generalize knowledge gained from a training task by assigning appropriate labels of unknown classes to text documents. Although existing studies have already investigated individual approaches to these categories, the experiments in literature do not provide a consistent comparison. This paper addresses this gap by conducting a systematic evaluation of different similarity-based and zero-shot approaches for text classification of unseen classes. Different state-of-the-art approaches are benchmarked on four text classification datasets, including a new dataset from the medical domain. Additionally, novel SimCSE and SBERT-based baselines are proposed, as other baselines used in existing work yield weak classification results and are easily outperformed. Finally, the novel similarity-based Lbl2TransformerVec approach is presented, which outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised text classification. Our experiments show that similarity-based approaches significantly outperform zero-shot approaches in most cases. Additionally, using SimCSE or SBERT embeddings instead of simpler text representations increases similarity-based classification results even further.

We present PubMed 200k RCT, a new dataset based on PubMed for sequential sentence classification. The dataset consists of approximately 200,000 abstracts of randomized controlled trials, totaling 2.3 million sentences. Each sentence of each abstract is labeled with their role in the abstract using one of the following classes: background, objective, method, result, or conclusion. The purpose of releasing this dataset is twofold. First, the majority of datasets for sequential short-text classification (i.e., classification of short texts that appear in sequences) are small: we hope that releasing a new large dataset will help develop more accurate algorithms for this task. Second, from an application perspective, researchers need better tools to efficiently skim through the literature. Automatically classifying each sentence in an abstract would help researchers read abstracts more efficiently, especially in fields where abstracts may be long, such as the medical field.

In NLP, text classification is one of the primary problems we try to solve and its uses in language analyses are indisputable. The lack of labeled training data made it harder to do these tasks in low resource languages like Amharic. The task of collecting, labeling, annotating, and making valuable this kind of data will encourage junior researchers, schools, and machine learning practitioners to implement existing classification models in their language. In this short paper, we aim to introduce the Amharic text classification dataset that consists of more than 50k news articles that were categorized into 6 classes. This dataset is made available with easy baseline performances to encourage studies and better performance experiments.

Complex chemical structures, like drugs, are usually defined by SMILES strings as a sequence of molecules and bonds. These SMILES strings are used in different complex machine learning-based drug-related research and representation works. Escaping from complex representation, in this work, we pose a single question: What if we treat drug SMILES as conventional sentences and engage in text classification for drug classification? Our experiments affirm the possibility with very competitive scores. The study explores the notion of viewing each atom and bond as sentence components, employing basic NLP methods to categorize drug types, proving that complex problems can also be solved with simpler perspectives. The data and code are available here: https://github.com/azminewasi/Drug-Classification-NLP.

Medical applications challenge today's text categorization techniques by demanding both high accuracy and ease-of-interpretation. Although deep learning has provided a leap ahead in accuracy, this leap comes at the sacrifice of interpretability. To address this accuracy-interpretability challenge, we here introduce, for the first time, a text categorization approach that leverages the recently introduced Tsetlin Machine. In all brevity, we represent the terms of a text as propositional variables. From these, we capture categories using simple propositional formulae, such as: if "rash" and "reaction" and "penicillin" then Allergy. The Tsetlin Machine learns these formulae from a labelled text, utilizing conjunctive clauses to represent the particular facets of each category. Indeed, even the absence of terms (negated features) can be used for categorization purposes. Our empirical comparison with Na\"ive Bayes, decision trees, linear support vector machines (SVMs), random forest, long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks, and other techniques, is quite conclusive. The Tsetlin Machine either performs on par with or outperforms all of the evaluated methods on both the 20 Newsgroups and IMDb datasets, as well as on a non-public clinical dataset. On average, the Tsetlin Machine delivers the best recall and precision scores across the datasets. Finally, our GPU implementation of the Tsetlin Machine executes 5 to 15 times faster than the CPU implementation, depending on the dataset. We thus believe that our novel approach can have a significant impact on a wide range of text analysis applications, forming a promising starting point for deeper natural language understanding with the Tsetlin Machine.

In an effort to catalog insect biodiversity, we propose a new large dataset of hand-labelled insect images, the BIOSCAN-Insect Dataset. Each record is taxonomically classified by an expert, and also has associated genetic information including raw nucleotide barcode sequences and assigned barcode index numbers, which are genetically-based proxies for species classification. This paper presents a curated million-image dataset, primarily to train computer-vision models capable of providing image-based taxonomic assessment, however, the dataset also presents compelling characteristics, the study of which would be of interest to the broader machine learning community. Driven by the biological nature inherent to the dataset, a characteristic long-tailed class-imbalance distribution is exhibited. Furthermore, taxonomic labelling is a hierarchical classification scheme, presenting a highly fine-grained classification problem at lower levels. Beyond spurring interest in biodiversity research within the machine learning community, progress on creating an image-based taxonomic classifier will also further the ultimate goal of all BIOSCAN research: to lay the foundation for a comprehensive survey of global biodiversity. This paper introduces the dataset and explores the classification task through the implementation and analysis of a baseline classifier.

This paper explores the usage of multimodal image-to-text models to enhance text-based item retrieval. We propose utilizing pre-trained image captioning and tagging models, such as instructBLIP and CLIP, to generate text-based product descriptions which are combined with existing text descriptions. Our work is particularly impactful for smaller eCommerce businesses who are unable to maintain the high-quality text descriptions necessary to effectively perform item retrieval for search and recommendation use cases. We evaluate the searchability of ground-truth text, image-generated text, and combinations of both texts on several subsets of Amazon's publicly available ESCI dataset. The results demonstrate the dual capability of our proposed models to enhance the retrieval of existing text and generate highly-searchable standalone descriptions.

Detecting objects based on language information is a popular task that includes Open-Vocabulary object Detection (OVD) and Referring Expression Comprehension (REC). In this paper, we advance them to a more practical setting called Described Object Detection (DOD) by expanding category names to flexible language expressions for OVD and overcoming the limitation of REC only grounding the pre-existing object. We establish the research foundation for DOD by constructing a Description Detection Dataset (D^3). This dataset features flexible language expressions, whether short category names or long descriptions, and annotating all described objects on all images without omission. By evaluating previous SOTA methods on D^3, we find some troublemakers that fail current REC, OVD, and bi-functional methods. REC methods struggle with confidence scores, rejecting negative instances, and multi-target scenarios, while OVD methods face constraints with long and complex descriptions. Recent bi-functional methods also do not work well on DOD due to their separated training procedures and inference strategies for REC and OVD tasks. Building upon the aforementioned findings, we propose a baseline that largely improves REC methods by reconstructing the training data and introducing a binary classification sub-task, outperforming existing methods. Data and code are available at https://github.com/shikras/d-cube and related works are tracked in https://github.com/Charles-Xie/awesome-described-object-detection.

Review websites, such as TripAdvisor and Yelp, allow users to post online reviews for various businesses, products and services, and have been recently shown to have a significant influence on consumer shopping behaviour. An online review typically consists of free-form text and a star rating out of 5. The problem of predicting a user's star rating for a product, given the user's text review for that product, is called Review Rating Prediction and has lately become a popular, albeit hard, problem in machine learning. In this paper, we treat Review Rating Prediction as a multi-class classification problem, and build sixteen different prediction models by combining four feature extraction methods, (i) unigrams, (ii) bigrams, (iii) trigrams and (iv) Latent Semantic Indexing, with four machine learning algorithms, (i) logistic regression, (ii) Naive Bayes classification, (iii) perceptrons, and (iv) linear Support Vector Classification. We analyse the performance of each of these sixteen models to come up with the best model for predicting the ratings from reviews. We use the dataset provided by Yelp for training and testing the models.

We describe new datasets for studying generalization from easy to hard examples.

Due to their high predictive performance and flexibility, machine learning models are an appropriate and efficient tool for ecologists. However, implementing a machine learning model is not yet a trivial task and may seem intimidating to ecologists with no previous experience in this area. Here we provide a series of tips to help ecologists in implementing machine learning models. We focus on classification problems as many ecological studies aim to assign data into predefined classes such as ecological states or biological entities. Each of the nine tips identifies a common error, trap or challenge in developing machine learning models and provides recommendations to facilitate their use in ecological studies.

This paper highlights the need to bring document classification benchmarking closer to real-world applications, both in the nature of data tested (X: multi-channel, multi-paged, multi-industry; Y: class distributions and label set variety) and in classification tasks considered (f: multi-page document, page stream, and document bundle classification, ...). We identify the lack of public multi-page document classification datasets, formalize different classification tasks arising in application scenarios, and motivate the value of targeting efficient multi-page document representations. An experimental study on proposed multi-page document classification datasets demonstrates that current benchmarks have become irrelevant and need to be updated to evaluate complete documents, as they naturally occur in practice. This reality check also calls for more mature evaluation methodologies, covering calibration evaluation, inference complexity (time-memory), and a range of realistic distribution shifts (e.g., born-digital vs. scanning noise, shifting page order). Our study ends on a hopeful note by recommending concrete avenues for future improvements.}

Clustering is an unsupervised learning problem that aims to partition unlabelled data points into groups with similar features. Traditional clustering algorithms provide limited insight into the groups they find as their main focus is accuracy and not the interpretability of the group assignments. This has spurred a recent line of work on explainable machine learning for clustering. In this paper we focus on the cluster description problem where, given a dataset and its partition into clusters, the task is to explain the clusters. We introduce a new approach to explain clusters by constructing polyhedra around each cluster while minimizing either the complexity of the resulting polyhedra or the number of features used in the description. We formulate the cluster description problem as an integer program and present a column generation approach to search over an exponential number of candidate half-spaces that can be used to build the polyhedra. To deal with large datasets, we introduce a novel grouping scheme that first forms smaller groups of data points and then builds the polyhedra around the grouped data, a strategy which out-performs simply sub-sampling data. Compared to state of the art cluster description algorithms, our approach is able to achieve competitive interpretability with improved description accuracy.

CLIP-based classifiers rely on the prompt containing a {class name} that is known to the text encoder. Therefore, they perform poorly on new classes or the classes whose names rarely appear on the Internet (e.g., scientific names of birds). For fine-grained classification, we propose PEEB - an explainable and editable classifier to (1) express the class name into a set of text descriptors that describe the visual parts of that class; and (2) match the embeddings of the detected parts to their textual descriptors in each class to compute a logit score for classification. In a zero-shot setting where the class names are unknown, PEEB outperforms CLIP by a huge margin (~10x in top-1 accuracy). Compared to part-based classifiers, PEEB is not only the state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the supervised-learning setting (88.80% and 92.20% accuracy on CUB-200 and Dogs-120, respectively) but also the first to enable users to edit the text descriptors to form a new classifier without any re-training. Compared to concept bottleneck models, PEEB is also the SOTA in both zero-shot and supervised-learning settings.

This paper introduces FGVC-Aircraft, a new dataset containing 10,000 images of aircraft spanning 100 aircraft models, organised in a three-level hierarchy. At the finer level, differences between models are often subtle but always visually measurable, making visual recognition challenging but possible. A benchmark is obtained by defining corresponding classification tasks and evaluation protocols, and baseline results are presented. The construction of this dataset was made possible by the work of aircraft enthusiasts, a strategy that can extend to the study of number of other object classes. Compared to the domains usually considered in fine-grained visual classification (FGVC), for example animals, aircraft are rigid and hence less deformable. They, however, present other interesting modes of variation, including purpose, size, designation, structure, historical style, and branding.

The increasing reliance on online recruitment platforms coupled with the adoption of AI technologies has highlighted the critical need for efficient resume classification methods. However, challenges such as small datasets, lack of standardized resume templates, and privacy concerns hinder the accuracy and effectiveness of existing classification models. In this work, we address these challenges by presenting a comprehensive approach to resume classification. We curated a large-scale dataset of 13,389 resumes from diverse sources and employed Large Language Models (LLMs) such as BERT and Gemma1.1 2B for classification. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over traditional machine learning approaches, with our best model achieving a top-1 accuracy of 92\% and a top-5 accuracy of 97.5\%. These findings underscore the importance of dataset quality and advanced model architectures in enhancing the accuracy and robustness of resume classification systems, thus advancing the field of online recruitment practices.

We define deriving semantic class targets as a novel multi-modal task. By doing so, we aim to improve classification schemes in the physical sciences which can be severely abstracted and obfuscating. We address this task for upcoming radio astronomy surveys and present the derived semantic radio galaxy morphology class targets.

EuroVoc is a multilingual thesaurus that was built for organizing the legislative documentary of the European Union institutions. It contains thousands of categories at different levels of specificity and its descriptors are targeted by legal texts in almost thirty languages. In this work we propose a unified framework for EuroVoc classification on 22 languages by fine-tuning modern Transformer-based pretrained language models. We study extensively the performance of our trained models and show that they significantly improve the results obtained by a similar tool - JEX - on the same dataset. The code and the fine-tuned models were open sourced, together with a programmatic interface that eases the process of loading the weights of a trained model and of classifying a new document.

Prototypical part network (ProtoPNet) methods have been designed to achieve interpretable classification by associating predictions with a set of training prototypes, which we refer to as trivial prototypes because they are trained to lie far from the classification boundary in the feature space. Note that it is possible to make an analogy between ProtoPNet and support vector machine (SVM) given that the classification from both methods relies on computing similarity with a set of training points (i.e., trivial prototypes in ProtoPNet, and support vectors in SVM). However, while trivial prototypes are located far from the classification boundary, support vectors are located close to this boundary, and we argue that this discrepancy with the well-established SVM theory can result in ProtoPNet models with inferior classification accuracy. In this paper, we aim to improve the classification of ProtoPNet with a new method to learn support prototypes that lie near the classification boundary in the feature space, as suggested by the SVM theory. In addition, we target the improvement of classification results with a new model, named ST-ProtoPNet, which exploits our support prototypes and the trivial prototypes to provide more effective classification. Experimental results on CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars, and Stanford Dogs datasets demonstrate that ST-ProtoPNet achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy and interpretability results. We also show that the proposed support prototypes tend to be better localised in the object of interest rather than in the background region.

We present a holistic approach to building a robust and useful natural language classification system for real-world content moderation. The success of such a system relies on a chain of carefully designed and executed steps, including the design of content taxonomies and labeling instructions, data quality control, an active learning pipeline to capture rare events, and a variety of methods to make the model robust and to avoid overfitting. Our moderation system is trained to detect a broad set of categories of undesired content, including sexual content, hateful content, violence, self-harm, and harassment. This approach generalizes to a wide range of different content taxonomies and can be used to create high-quality content classifiers that outperform off-the-shelf models.

Prompt-based classifiers are an attractive approach for zero-shot classification. However, the precise choice of the prompt template and label words can largely influence performance, with semantically equivalent settings often showing notable performance difference. This discrepancy can be partly attributed to word biases, where the classifier may be biased towards classes. To address this problem, it is possible to optimise classification thresholds on a labelled data set, however, this mitigates some of the advantages of prompt-based classifiers. This paper instead approaches this problem by examining the expected marginal probabilities of the classes. Here, probabilities are reweighted to have a uniform prior over classes, in an unsupervised fashion. Further, we draw a theoretical connection between the class priors and the language models' word prior, and offer the ability to set a threshold in a zero-resource fashion. We show that matching class priors correlates strongly with the oracle upper bound performance and demonstrate large consistent performance gains for prompt settings over a range of NLP tasks.

Automated classification of metadata of research data by their discipline(s) of research can be used in scientometric research, by repository service providers, and in the context of research data aggregation services. Openly available metadata of the DataCite index for research data were used to compile a large training and evaluation set comprised of 609,524 records, which is published alongside this paper. These data allow to reproducibly assess classification approaches, such as tree-based models and neural networks. According to our experiments with 20 base classes (multi-label classification), multi-layer perceptron models perform best with a f1-macro score of 0.760 closely followed by Long Short-Term Memory models (f1-macro score of 0.755). A possible application of the trained classification models is the quantitative analysis of trends towards interdisciplinarity of digital scholarly output or the characterization of growth patterns of research data, stratified by discipline of research. Both applications perform at scale with the proposed models which are available for re-use.

Audio Description (AD) is the task of generating descriptions of visual content, at suitable time intervals, for the benefit of visually impaired audiences. For movies, this presents notable challenges -- AD must occur only during existing pauses in dialogue, should refer to characters by name, and ought to aid understanding of the storyline as a whole. To this end, we develop a new model for automatically generating movie AD, given CLIP visual features of the frames, the cast list, and the temporal locations of the speech; addressing all three of the 'who', 'when', and 'what' questions: (i) who -- we introduce a character bank consisting of the character's name, the actor that played the part, and a CLIP feature of their face, for the principal cast of each movie, and demonstrate how this can be used to improve naming in the generated AD; (ii) when -- we investigate several models for determining whether an AD should be generated for a time interval or not, based on the visual content of the interval and its neighbours; and (iii) what -- we implement a new vision-language model for this task, that can ingest the proposals from the character bank, whilst conditioning on the visual features using cross-attention, and demonstrate how this improves over previous architectures for AD text generation in an apples-to-apples comparison.

TextDescriptives is a Python package for calculating a large variety of metrics from text. It is built on top of spaCy and can be easily integrated into existing workflows. The package has already been used for analysing the linguistic stability of clinical texts, creating features for predicting neuropsychiatric conditions, and analysing linguistic goals of primary school students. This paper describes the package and its features.

Inspired by the outstanding zero-shot capability of vision language models (VLMs) in image classification tasks, open-vocabulary object detection has attracted increasing interest by distilling the broad VLM knowledge into detector training. However, most existing open-vocabulary detectors learn by aligning region embeddings with categorical labels (e.g., bicycle) only, disregarding the capability of VLMs on aligning visual embeddings with fine-grained text description of object parts (e.g., pedals and bells). This paper presents DVDet, a Descriptor-Enhanced Open Vocabulary Detector that introduces conditional context prompts and hierarchical textual descriptors that enable precise region-text alignment as well as open-vocabulary detection training in general. Specifically, the conditional context prompt transforms regional embeddings into image-like representations that can be directly integrated into general open vocabulary detection training. In addition, we introduce large language models as an interactive and implicit knowledge repository which enables iterative mining and refining visually oriented textual descriptors for precise region-text alignment. Extensive experiments over multiple large-scale benchmarks show that DVDet outperforms the state-of-the-art consistently by large margins.

In this paper, we present a Diffusion GAN based approach (Prosodic Diff-TTS) to generate the corresponding high-fidelity speech based on the style description and content text as an input to generate speech samples within only 4 denoising steps. It leverages the novel conditional prosodic layer normalization to incorporate the style embeddings into the multi head attention based phoneme encoder and mel spectrogram decoder based generator architecture to generate the speech. The style embedding is generated by fine tuning the pretrained BERT model on auxiliary tasks such as pitch, speaking speed, emotion,gender classifications. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed architecture on multi-speaker LibriTTS and PromptSpeech datasets, using multiple quantitative metrics that measure generated accuracy and MOS.

With the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs), new and hard-to-predict harmful capabilities are emerging. This requires developers to be able to identify risks through the evaluation of "dangerous capabilities" in order to responsibly deploy LLMs. In this work, we collect the first open-source dataset to evaluate safeguards in LLMs, and deploy safer open-source LLMs at a low cost. Our dataset is curated and filtered to consist only of instructions that responsible language models should not follow. We annotate and assess the responses of six popular LLMs to these instructions. Based on our annotation, we proceed to train several BERT-like classifiers, and find that these small classifiers can achieve results that are comparable with GPT-4 on automatic safety evaluation. Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.

In this paper, we present our approaches for the FinSim-3 Shared Task 2021: Learning Semantic Similarities for the Financial Domain. The aim of this shared task is to correctly classify a list of given terms from the financial domain into the most relevant hypernym (or top-level) concept in an external ontology. For our system submission, we evaluate two methods: a Sentence-RoBERTa (SRoBERTa) embeddings model pre-trained on a custom corpus, and a dual word-sentence embeddings model that builds on the first method by improving the proposed baseline word embeddings construction using the FastText model to boost the classification performance. Our system ranks 2nd overall on both metrics, scoring 0.917 on Average Accuracy and 1.141 on Mean Rank.

We consider the two related problems of detecting if an example is misclassified or out-of-distribution. We present a simple baseline that utilizes probabilities from softmax distributions. Correctly classified examples tend to have greater maximum softmax probabilities than erroneously classified and out-of-distribution examples, allowing for their detection. We assess performance by defining several tasks in computer vision, natural language processing, and automatic speech recognition, showing the effectiveness of this baseline across all. We then show the baseline can sometimes be surpassed, demonstrating the room for future research on these underexplored detection tasks.

In this work, we develop a technique to produce counterfactual visual explanations. Given a 'query' image I for which a vision system predicts class c, a counterfactual visual explanation identifies how I could change such that the system would output a different specified class c'. To do this, we select a 'distractor' image I' that the system predicts as class c' and identify spatial regions in I and I' such that replacing the identified region in I with the identified region in I' would push the system towards classifying I as c'. We apply our approach to multiple image classification datasets generating qualitative results showcasing the interpretability and discriminativeness of our counterfactual explanations. To explore the effectiveness of our explanations in teaching humans, we present machine teaching experiments for the task of fine-grained bird classification. We find that users trained to distinguish bird species fare better when given access to counterfactual explanations in addition to training examples.

The visual classification performance of vision-language models such as CLIP has been shown to benefit from additional semantic knowledge from large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3. In particular, averaging over LLM-generated class descriptors, e.g. "waffle, which has a round shape", can notably improve generalization performance. In this work, we critically study this behavior and propose WaffleCLIP, a framework for zero-shot visual classification which simply replaces LLM-generated descriptors with random character and word descriptors. Without querying external models, we achieve comparable performance gains on a large number of visual classification tasks. This allows WaffleCLIP to both serve as a low-cost alternative, as well as a sanity check for any future LLM-based vision-language model extensions. We conduct an extensive experimental study on the impact and shortcomings of additional semantics introduced with LLM-generated descriptors, and showcase how - if available - semantic context is better leveraged by querying LLMs for high-level concepts, which we show can be done to jointly resolve potential class name ambiguities. Code is available here: https://github.com/ExplainableML/WaffleCLIP.

Content metadata plays a very important role in movie recommender systems as it provides valuable information about various aspects of a movie such as genre, cast, plot synopsis, box office summary, etc. Analyzing the metadata can help understand the user preferences to generate personalized recommendations and item cold starting. In this talk, we will focus on one particular type of metadata - genre labels. Genre labels associated with a movie or a TV series help categorize a collection of titles into different themes and correspondingly setting up the audience expectation. We present some of the challenges associated with using genre label information and propose a new way of examining the genre information that we call as the Genre Spectrum. The Genre Spectrum helps capture the various nuanced genres in a title and our offline and online experiments corroborate the effectiveness of the approach. Furthermore, we also talk about applications of LLMs in augmenting content metadata which could eventually be used to achieve effective organization of recommendations in user's 2-D home-grid.

This paper describes our winning contribution to SemEval 2018 Task 4: Character Identification on Multiparty Dialogues. It is a simple, standard model with one key innovation, an entity library. Our results show that this innovation greatly facilitates the identification of infrequent characters. Because of the generic nature of our model, this finding is potentially relevant to any task that requires effective learning from sparse or unbalanced data.

Recent research has repeatedly shown that machine learning techniques can be applied to either whole files or file fragments to classify them for analysis. We build upon these techniques to show that for samples of un-labeled compiled computer object code, one can apply the same type of analysis to classify important aspects of the code, such as its target architecture and endianess. We show that using simple byte-value histograms we retain enough information about the opcodes within a sample to classify the target architecture with high accuracy, and then discuss heuristic-based features that exploit information within the operands to determine endianess. We introduce a dataset with over 16000 code samples from 20 architectures and experimentally show that by using our features, classifiers can achieve very high accuracy with relatively small sample sizes.

Descriptive video service (DVS) provides linguistic descriptions of movies and allows visually impaired people to follow a movie along with their peers. Such descriptions are by design mainly visual and thus naturally form an interesting data source for computer vision and computational linguistics. In this work we propose a novel dataset which contains transcribed DVS, which is temporally aligned to full length HD movies. In addition we also collected the aligned movie scripts which have been used in prior work and compare the two different sources of descriptions. In total the Movie Description dataset contains a parallel corpus of over 54,000 sentences and video snippets from 72 HD movies. We characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for generating video descriptions. Comparing DVS to scripts, we find that DVS is far more visual and describes precisely what is shown rather than what should happen according to the scripts created prior to movie production.

Pre-trained models for Czech Natural Language Processing are often evaluated on purely linguistic tasks (POS tagging, parsing, NER) and relatively simple classification tasks such as sentiment classification or article classification from a single news source. As an alternative, we present CZEch~NEws~Classification~dataset (CZE-NEC), one of the largest Czech classification datasets, composed of news articles from various sources spanning over twenty years, which allows a more rigorous evaluation of such models. We define four classification tasks: news source, news category, inferred author's gender, and day of the week. To verify the task difficulty, we conducted a human evaluation, which revealed that human performance lags behind strong machine-learning baselines built upon pre-trained transformer models. Furthermore, we show that language-specific pre-trained encoder analysis outperforms selected commercially available large-scale generative language models.

Prompt Tuning is emerging as a scalable and cost-effective method to fine-tune Pretrained Language Models (PLMs), which are often referred to as Large Language Models (LLMs). This study benchmarks the performance and computational efficiency of Prompt Tuning and baselines for multi-label text classification. This is applied to the challenging task of classifying companies into an investment firm's proprietary industry taxonomy, supporting their thematic investment strategy. Text-to-text classification is frequently reported to outperform task-specific classification heads, but has several limitations when applied to a multi-label classification problem where each label consists of multiple tokens: (a) Generated labels may not match any label in the label taxonomy; (b) The fine-tuning process lacks permutation invariance and is sensitive to the order of the provided labels; (c) The model provides binary decisions rather than appropriate confidence scores. Limitation (a) is addressed by applying constrained decoding using Trie Search, which slightly improves classification performance. All limitations (a), (b), and (c) are addressed by replacing the PLM's language head with a classification head, which is referred to as Prompt Tuned Embedding Classification (PTEC). This improves performance significantly, while also reducing computational costs during inference. In our industrial application, the training data is skewed towards well-known companies. We confirm that the model's performance is consistent across both well-known and less-known companies. Our overall results indicate the continuing need to adapt state-of-the-art methods to domain-specific tasks, even in the era of PLMs with strong generalization abilities. We release our codebase and a benchmarking dataset at https://github.com/EQTPartners/PTEC.

As infamous invaders to the North American ecosystem, the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) is devastating not only to native bee colonies, but also to local apiculture. One of the most effective way to combat the harmful species is to locate and destroy their nests. By mobilizing the public to actively report possible sightings of the Asian giant hornet, the governmentcould timely send inspectors to confirm and possibly destroy the nests. However, such confirmation requires lab expertise, where manually checking the reports one by one is extremely consuming of human resources. Further given the limited knowledge of the public about the Asian giant hornet and the randomness of report submission, only few of the numerous reports proved positive, i.e. existing nests. How to classify or prioritize the reports efficiently and automatically, so as to determine the dispatch of personnel, is of great significance to the control of the Asian giant hornet. In this paper, we propose a method to predict the priority of sighting reports based on machine learning. We model the problem of optimal prioritization of sighting reports as a problem of classification and prediction. We extracted a variety of rich features in the report: location, time, image(s), and textual description. Based on these characteristics, we propose a classification model based on logistic regression to predict the credibility of a certain report. Furthermore, our model quantifies the impact between reports to get the priority ranking of the reports. Extensive experiments on the public dataset from the WSDA (the Washington State Department of Agriculture) have proved the effectiveness of our method.

Machine learning models, such as neural networks, decision trees, random forests, and gradient boosting machines, accept a feature vector, and provide a prediction. These models learn in a supervised fashion where we provide feature vectors mapped to the expected output. It is common practice to engineer new features from the provided feature set. Such engineered features will either augment or replace portions of the existing feature vector. These engineered features are essentially calculated fields based on the values of the other features. Engineering such features is primarily a manual, time-consuming task. Additionally, each type of model will respond differently to different kinds of engineered features. This paper reports empirical research to demonstrate what kinds of engineered features are best suited to various machine learning model types. We provide this recommendation by generating several datasets that we designed to benefit from a particular type of engineered feature. The experiment demonstrates to what degree the machine learning model can synthesize the needed feature on its own. If a model can synthesize a planned feature, it is not necessary to provide that feature. The research demonstrated that the studied models do indeed perform differently with various types of engineered features.

With the increasing numbers of publicly available models, there are probably pretrained, online models for most tasks users require. However, current model search methods are rudimentary, essentially a text-based search in the documentation, thus users cannot find the relevant models. This paper presents ProbeLog, a method for retrieving classification models that can recognize a target concept, such as "Dog", without access to model metadata or training data. Differently from previous probing methods, ProbeLog computes a descriptor for each output dimension (logit) of each model, by observing its responses on a fixed set of inputs (probes). Our method supports both logit-based retrieval ("find more logits like this") and zero-shot, text-based retrieval ("find all logits corresponding to dogs"). As probing-based representations require multiple costly feedforward passes through the model, we develop a method, based on collaborative filtering, that reduces the cost of encoding repositories by 3x. We demonstrate that ProbeLog achieves high retrieval accuracy, both in real-world and fine-grained search tasks and is scalable to full-size repositories.

Novel Class Discovery (NCD) is a growing field where we are given during training a labeled set of known classes and an unlabeled set of different classes that must be discovered. In recent years, many methods have been proposed to address this problem, and the field has begun to mature. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art NCD methods. We start by formally defining the NCD problem and introducing important notions. We then give an overview of the different families of approaches, organized by the way they transfer knowledge from the labeled set to the unlabeled set. We find that they either learn in two stages, by first extracting knowledge from the labeled data only and then applying it to the unlabeled data, or in one stage by conjointly learning on both sets. For each family, we describe their general principle and detail a few representative methods. Then, we briefly introduce some new related tasks inspired by the increasing number of NCD works. We also present some common tools and techniques used in NCD, such as pseudo labeling, self-supervised learning and contrastive learning. Finally, to help readers unfamiliar with the NCD problem differentiate it from other closely related domains, we summarize some of the closest areas of research and discuss their main differences.

Most positive and unlabeled data is subject to selection biases. The labeled examples can, for example, be selected from the positive set because they are easier to obtain or more obviously positive. This paper investigates how learning can be ena BHbled in this setting. We propose and theoretically analyze an empirical-risk-based method for incorporating the labeling mechanism. Additionally, we investigate under which assumptions learning is possible when the labeling mechanism is not fully understood and propose a practical method to enable this. Our empirical analysis supports the theoretical results and shows that taking into account the possibility of a selection bias, even when the labeling mechanism is unknown, improves the trained classifiers.

We present Galaxy Zoo DECaLS: detailed visual morphological classifications for Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey images of galaxies within the SDSS DR8 footprint. Deeper DECaLS images (r=23.6 vs. r=22.2 from SDSS) reveal spiral arms, weak bars, and tidal features not previously visible in SDSS imaging. To best exploit the greater depth of DECaLS images, volunteers select from a new set of answers designed to improve our sensitivity to mergers and bars. Galaxy Zoo volunteers provide 7.5 million individual classifications over 314,000 galaxies. 140,000 galaxies receive at least 30 classifications, sufficient to accurately measure detailed morphology like bars, and the remainder receive approximately 5. All classifications are used to train an ensemble of Bayesian convolutional neural networks (a state-of-the-art deep learning method) to predict posteriors for the detailed morphology of all 314,000 galaxies. When measured against confident volunteer classifications, the networks are approximately 99% accurate on every question. Morphology is a fundamental feature of every galaxy; our human and machine classifications are an accurate and detailed resource for understanding how galaxies evolve.

Some neurons in deep networks specialize in recognizing highly specific perceptual, structural, or semantic features of inputs. In computer vision, techniques exist for identifying neurons that respond to individual concept categories like colors, textures, and object classes. But these techniques are limited in scope, labeling only a small subset of neurons and behaviors in any network. Is a richer characterization of neuron-level computation possible? We introduce a procedure (called MILAN, for mutual-information-guided linguistic annotation of neurons) that automatically labels neurons with open-ended, compositional, natural language descriptions. Given a neuron, MILAN generates a description by searching for a natural language string that maximizes pointwise mutual information with the image regions in which the neuron is active. MILAN produces fine-grained descriptions that capture categorical, relational, and logical structure in learned features. These descriptions obtain high agreement with human-generated feature descriptions across a diverse set of model architectures and tasks, and can aid in understanding and controlling learned models. We highlight three applications of natural language neuron descriptions. First, we use MILAN for analysis, characterizing the distribution and importance of neurons selective for attribute, category, and relational information in vision models. Second, we use MILAN for auditing, surfacing neurons sensitive to human faces in datasets designed to obscure them. Finally, we use MILAN for editing, improving robustness in an image classifier by deleting neurons sensitive to text features spuriously correlated with class labels.

In the U.S. historically, local newspapers drew their content largely from newswires like the Associated Press. Historians argue that newswires played a pivotal role in creating a national identity and shared understanding of the world, but there is no comprehensive archive of the content sent over newswires. We reconstruct such an archive by applying a customized deep learning pipeline to hundreds of terabytes of raw image scans from thousands of local newspapers. The resulting dataset contains 2.7 million unique public domain U.S. newswire articles, written between 1878 and 1977. Locations in these articles are georeferenced, topics are tagged using customized neural topic classification, named entities are recognized, and individuals are disambiguated to Wikipedia using a novel entity disambiguation model. To construct the Newswire dataset, we first recognize newspaper layouts and transcribe around 138 millions structured article texts from raw image scans. We then use a customized neural bi-encoder model to de-duplicate reproduced articles, in the presence of considerable abridgement and noise, quantifying how widely each article was reproduced. A text classifier is used to ensure that we only include newswire articles, which historically are in the public domain. The structured data that accompany the texts provide rich information about the who (disambiguated individuals), what (topics), and where (georeferencing) of the news that millions of Americans read over the course of a century. We also include Library of Congress metadata information about the newspapers that ran the articles on their front pages. The Newswire dataset is useful both for large language modeling - expanding training data beyond what is available from modern web texts - and for studying a diversity of questions in computational linguistics, social science, and the digital humanities.

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD), detecting specific classes of objects using only their linguistic descriptions (e.g., class names) without any image samples, has garnered significant attention. However, in real-world applications, the target class concepts is often hard to describe in text and the only way to specify target objects is to provide their image examples, yet it is often challenging to obtain a good number of samples. Thus, there is a high demand from practitioners for few-shot object detection (FSOD). A natural question arises: Can the benefits of OVD extend to FSOD for object classes that are difficult to describe in text? Compared to traditional methods that learn only predefined classes (referred to in this paper as closed-set object detection, COD), can the extra cost of OVD be justified? To answer these questions, we propose a method to quantify the ``text-describability'' of object detection datasets using the zero-shot image classification accuracy with CLIP. This allows us to categorize various OD datasets with different text-describability and emprically evaluate the FSOD performance of OVD and COD methods within each category. Our findings reveal that: i) there is little difference between OVD and COD for object classes with low text-describability under equal conditions in OD pretraining; and ii) although OVD can learn from more diverse data than OD-specific data, thereby increasing the volume of training data, it can be counterproductive for classes with low-text-describability. These findings provide practitioners with valuable guidance amidst the recent advancements of OVD methods.

Machine learning practitioners often have access to a spectrum of data: labeled data for the target task (which is often limited), unlabeled data, and auxiliary data, the many available labeled datasets for other tasks. We describe TAGLETS, a system built to study techniques for automatically exploiting all three types of data and creating high-quality, servable classifiers. The key components of TAGLETS are: (1) auxiliary data organized according to a knowledge graph, (2) modules encapsulating different methods for exploiting auxiliary and unlabeled data, and (3) a distillation stage in which the ensembled modules are combined into a servable model. We compare TAGLETS with state-of-the-art transfer learning and semi-supervised learning methods on four image classification tasks. Our study covers a range of settings, varying the amount of labeled data and the semantic relatedness of the auxiliary data to the target task. We find that the intelligent incorporation of auxiliary and unlabeled data into multiple learning techniques enables TAGLETS to match-and most often significantly surpass-these alternatives. TAGLETS is available as an open-source system at github.com/BatsResearch/taglets.

We present ShapeNet: a richly-annotated, large-scale repository of shapes represented by 3D CAD models of objects. ShapeNet contains 3D models from a multitude of semantic categories and organizes them under the WordNet taxonomy. It is a collection of datasets providing many semantic annotations for each 3D model such as consistent rigid alignments, parts and bilateral symmetry planes, physical sizes, keywords, as well as other planned annotations. Annotations are made available through a public web-based interface to enable data visualization of object attributes, promote data-driven geometric analysis, and provide a large-scale quantitative benchmark for research in computer graphics and vision. At the time of this technical report, ShapeNet has indexed more than 3,000,000 models, 220,000 models out of which are classified into 3,135 categories (WordNet synsets). In this report we describe the ShapeNet effort as a whole, provide details for all currently available datasets, and summarize future plans.

In this paper we present a hybrid method for the automatic detection of dermatological pathologies in medical reports. We use a large language model combined with medical ontologies to predict, given a first appointment or follow-up medical report, the pathology a person may suffer from. The results show that teaching the model to learn the type, severity and location on the body of a dermatological pathology, as well as in which order it has to learn these three features, significantly increases its accuracy. The article presents the demonstration of state-of-the-art results for classification of medical texts with a precision of 0.84, micro and macro F1-score of 0.82 and 0.75, and makes both the method and the data set used available to the community.

This study explores strategies for efficiently classifying scientific full texts using both small, BERT-based models and local large language models like Llama-3.1 8B. We focus on developing methods for selecting subsets of input sentences to reduce input size while simultaneously enhancing classification performance. To this end, we compile a novel dataset consisting of full-text scientific papers from the field of invasion biology, specifically addressing the impacts of invasive species. These papers are aligned with publicly available impact assessments created by researchers for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that various sources like human evidence annotations, LLM-generated annotations or explainability scores can be used to train sentence selection models that improve the performance of both encoder- and decoder-based language models while optimizing efficiency through the reduction in input length, leading to improved results even if compared to models like ModernBERT that are able to handle the complete text as input. Additionally, we find that repeated sampling of shorter inputs proves to be a very effective strategy that, at a slightly increased cost, can further improve classification performance.

This paper introduces a new tool, OccCANINE, to automatically transform occupational descriptions into the HISCO classification system. The manual work involved in processing and classifying occupational descriptions is error-prone, tedious, and time-consuming. We finetune a preexisting language model (CANINE) to do this automatically thereby performing in seconds and minutes what previously took days and weeks. The model is trained on 14 million pairs of occupational descriptions and HISCO codes in 13 different languages contributed by 22 different sources. Our approach is shown to have accuracy, recall and precision above 90 percent. Our tool breaks the metaphorical HISCO barrier and makes this data readily available for analysis of occupational structures with broad applicability in economics, economic history and various related disciplines.

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is the task of assigning labels to a text within a structured space organized as a hierarchy. Recent works treat HTC as a conventional multilabel classification problem, therefore evaluating it as such. We instead propose to evaluate models based on specifically designed hierarchical metrics and we demonstrate the intricacy of metric choice and prediction inference method. We introduce a new challenging dataset and we evaluate fairly, recent sophisticated models, comparing them with a range of simple but strong baselines, including a new theoretically motivated loss. Finally, we show that those baselines are very often competitive with the latest models. This highlights the importance of carefully considering the evaluation methodology when proposing new methods for HTC. Code implementation and dataset are available at https://github.com/RomanPlaud/revisitingHTC.

Improving the quality of search results can significantly enhance users experience and engagement with search engines. In spite of several recent advancements in the fields of machine learning and data mining, correctly classifying items for a particular user search query has been a long-standing challenge, which still has a large room for improvement. This paper introduces the "Shopping Queries Dataset", a large dataset of difficult Amazon search queries and results, publicly released with the aim of fostering research in improving the quality of search results. The dataset contains around 130 thousand unique queries and 2.6 million manually labeled (query,product) relevance judgements. The dataset is multilingual with queries in English, Japanese, and Spanish. The Shopping Queries Dataset is being used in one of the KDDCup'22 challenges. In this paper, we describe the dataset and present three evaluation tasks along with baseline results: (i) ranking the results list, (ii) classifying product results into relevance categories, and (iii) identifying substitute products for a given query. We anticipate that this data will become the gold standard for future research in the topic of product search.

Skill Classification (SC) is the task of classifying job competences from job postings. This work is the first in SC applied to Danish job vacancy data. We release the first Danish job posting dataset: Kompetencer (en: competences), annotated for nested spans of competences. To improve upon coarse-grained annotations, we make use of The European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO; le Vrang et al., 2014) taxonomy API to obtain fine-grained labels via distant supervision. We study two setups: The zero-shot and few-shot classification setting. We fine-tune English-based models and RemBERT (Chung et al., 2020) and compare them to in-language Danish models. Our results show RemBERT significantly outperforms all other models in both the zero-shot and the few-shot setting.

A recently introduced text classifier, called SS3, has obtained state-of-the-art performance on the CLEF's eRisk tasks. SS3 was created to deal with risk detection over text streams and, therefore, not only supports incremental training and classification but also can visually explain its rationale. However, little attention has been paid to the potential use of SS3 as a general classifier. We believe this could be due to the unavailability of an open-source implementation of SS3. In this work, we introduce PySS3, a package that implements SS3 and also comes with visualization tools that allow researchers to deploy robust, explainable, and trusty machine learning models for text classification.

Objective: To transform heterogeneous clinical data from electronic health records into clinically meaningful constructed features using data driven method that rely, in part, on temporal relations among data. Materials and Methods: The clinically meaningful representations of medical concepts and patients are the key for health analytic applications. Most of existing approaches directly construct features mapped to raw data (e.g., ICD or CPT codes), or utilize some ontology mapping such as SNOMED codes. However, none of the existing approaches leverage EHR data directly for learning such concept representation. We propose a new way to represent heterogeneous medical concepts (e.g., diagnoses, medications and procedures) based on co-occurrence patterns in longitudinal electronic health records. The intuition behind the method is to map medical concepts that are co-occuring closely in time to similar concept vectors so that their distance will be small. We also derive a simple method to construct patient vectors from the related medical concept vectors. Results: For qualitative evaluation, we study similar medical concepts across diagnosis, medication and procedure. In quantitative evaluation, our proposed representation significantly improves the predictive modeling performance for onset of heart failure (HF), where classification methods (e.g. logistic regression, neural network, support vector machine and K-nearest neighbors) achieve up to 23% improvement in area under the ROC curve (AUC) using this proposed representation. Conclusion: We proposed an effective method for patient and medical concept representation learning. The resulting representation can map relevant concepts together and also improves predictive modeling performance.

Recent improvements in the quality of the generations by large language models have spurred research into identifying machine-generated text. Systems proposed for the task often achieve high performance. However, humans and machines can produce text in different styles and in different domains, and it remains unclear whether machine generated-text detection models favour particular styles or domains. In this paper, we critically examine the classification performance for detecting machine-generated text by evaluating on texts with varying writing styles. We find that classifiers are highly sensitive to stylistic changes and differences in text complexity, and in some cases degrade entirely to random classifiers. We further find that detection systems are particularly susceptible to misclassify easy-to-read texts while they have high performance for complex texts.

Dataset summarisation is a fruitful approach to dataset inspection. However, when applied to a single dataset the discovery of visual concepts is restricted to those most prominent. We argue that a comparative approach can expand upon this paradigm to enable richer forms of dataset inspection that go beyond the most prominent concepts. To enable dataset comparison we present a module that learns concept-level prototypes across datasets. We leverage self-supervised learning to discover these prototypes without supervision, and we demonstrate the benefits of our approach in two case-studies. Our findings show that dataset comparison extends dataset inspection and we hope to encourage more works in this direction. Code and usage instructions available at https://github.com/Nanne/ProtoSim

Natural language processing (NLP) and neural networks (NNs) have both undergone significant changes in recent years. For active learning (AL) purposes, NNs are, however, less commonly used -- despite their current popularity. By using the superior text classification performance of NNs for AL, we can either increase a model's performance using the same amount of data or reduce the data and therefore the required annotation efforts while keeping the same performance. We review AL for text classification using deep neural networks (DNNs) and elaborate on two main causes which used to hinder the adoption: (a) the inability of NNs to provide reliable uncertainty estimates, on which the most commonly used query strategies rely, and (b) the challenge of training DNNs on small data. To investigate the former, we construct a taxonomy of query strategies, which distinguishes between data-based, model-based, and prediction-based instance selection, and investigate the prevalence of these classes in recent research. Moreover, we review recent NN-based advances in NLP like word embeddings or language models in the context of (D)NNs, survey the current state-of-the-art at the intersection of AL, text classification, and DNNs and relate recent advances in NLP to AL. Finally, we analyze recent work in AL for text classification, connect the respective query strategies to the taxonomy, and outline commonalities and shortcomings. As a result, we highlight gaps in current research and present open research questions.

Recent foundational language models have shown state-of-the-art performance in many NLP tasks in zero- and few-shot settings. An advantage of these models over more standard approaches based on fine-tuning is the ability to understand instructions written in natural language (prompts), which helps them generalise better to different tasks and domains without the need for specific training data. This makes them suitable for addressing text classification problems for domains with limited amounts of annotated instances. However, existing research is limited in scale and lacks understanding of how text generation models combined with prompting techniques compare to more established methods for text classification such as fine-tuning masked language models. In this paper, we address this research gap by performing a large-scale evaluation study for 16 text classification datasets covering binary, multiclass, and multilabel problems. In particular, we compare zero- and few-shot approaches of large language models to fine-tuning smaller language models. We also analyse the results by prompt, classification type, domain, and number of labels. In general, the results show how fine-tuning smaller and more efficient language models can still outperform few-shot approaches of larger language models, which have room for improvement when it comes to text classification.

Innovation is a major driver of economic and social development, and information about many kinds of innovation is embedded in semi-structured data from patents and patent applications. Although the impact and novelty of innovations expressed in patent data are difficult to measure through traditional means, ML offers a promising set of techniques for evaluating novelty, summarizing contributions, and embedding semantics. In this paper, we introduce the Harvard USPTO Patent Dataset (HUPD), a large-scale, well-structured, and multi-purpose corpus of English-language patent applications filed to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) between 2004 and 2018. With more than 4.5 million patent documents, HUPD is two to three times larger than comparable corpora. Unlike previously proposed patent datasets in NLP, HUPD contains the inventor-submitted versions of patent applications--not the final versions of granted patents--thereby allowing us to study patentability at the time of filing using NLP methods for the first time. It is also novel in its inclusion of rich structured metadata alongside the text of patent filings: By providing each application's metadata along with all of its text fields, the dataset enables researchers to perform new sets of NLP tasks that leverage variation in structured covariates. As a case study on the types of research HUPD makes possible, we introduce a new task to the NLP community--namely, binary classification of patent decisions. We additionally show the structured metadata provided in the dataset enables us to conduct explicit studies of concept shifts for this task. Finally, we demonstrate how HUPD can be used for three additional tasks: multi-class classification of patent subject areas, language modeling, and summarization.

Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have been cherished for their ability to perform zero-shot visual recognition on open-vocabulary concepts. This is achieved by selecting the object category whose textual representation bears the highest similarity with the query image. While successful in some domains, this method struggles with identifying fine-grained entities as well as generalizing to unseen concepts that are not captured by the training distribution. Recent works attempt to mitigate these challenges by integrating category descriptions at test time, albeit yielding modest improvements. We attribute these limited gains to a fundamental misalignment between image and description representations, which is rooted in the pretraining structure of CLIP. In this paper, we propose GRAIN, a new pretraining strategy aimed at aligning representations at both fine and coarse levels simultaneously. Our approach learns to jointly ground textual descriptions in image regions along with aligning overarching captions with global image representations. To drive this pre-training, we leverage frozen Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to derive large-scale synthetic annotations. We demonstrate the enhanced zero-shot performance of our model compared to current state-of-the art methods across 11 diverse image classification datasets. Additionally, we introduce Products-2023, a newly curated, manually labeled dataset featuring novel concepts, and showcase our model's ability to recognize these concepts by benchmarking on it. Significant improvements achieved by our model on other downstream tasks like retrieval further highlight the superior quality of representations learned by our approach. Code available at https://github.com/shaunak27/grain-clip .

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.

Geological borehole descriptions contain detailed textual information about the composition of the subsurface. However, their unstructured format presents significant challenges for extracting relevant features into a structured format. This paper introduces GEOBERTje: a domain adapted large language model trained on geological borehole descriptions from Flanders (Belgium) in the Dutch language. This model effectively extracts relevant information from the borehole descriptions and represents it into a numeric vector space. Showcasing just one potential application of GEOBERTje, we finetune a classifier model on a limited number of manually labeled observations. This classifier categorizes borehole descriptions into a main, second and third lithology class. We show that our classifier outperforms both a rule-based approach and GPT-4 of OpenAI. This study exemplifies how domain adapted large language models enhance the efficiency and accuracy of extracting information from complex, unstructured geological descriptions. This offers new opportunities for geological analysis and modeling using vast amounts of data.

In this work, we study the challenge of providing human-understandable descriptions for failure modes in trained image classification models. Existing works address this problem by first identifying clusters (or directions) of incorrectly classified samples in a latent space and then aiming to provide human-understandable text descriptions for them. We observe that in some cases, describing text does not match well with identified failure modes, partially owing to the fact that shared interpretable attributes of failure modes may not be captured using clustering in the feature space. To improve on these shortcomings, we propose a novel approach that prioritizes interpretability in this problem: we start by obtaining human-understandable concepts (tags) of images in the dataset and then analyze the model's behavior based on the presence or absence of combinations of these tags. Our method also ensures that the tags describing a failure mode form a minimal set, avoiding redundant and noisy descriptions. Through several experiments on different datasets, we show that our method successfully identifies failure modes and generates high-quality text descriptions associated with them. These results highlight the importance of prioritizing interpretability in understanding model failures.

Mathematical symbols and descriptions appear in various forms across document section boundaries without explicit markup. In this paper, we present a new large-scale dataset that emphasizes extracting symbols and descriptions in scientific documents. Symlink annotates scientific papers of 5 different domains (i.e., computer science, biology, physics, mathematics, and economics). Our experiments on Symlink demonstrate the challenges of the symbol-description linking task for existing models and call for further research effort in this area. We will publicly release Symlink to facilitate future research.

Patent examiners need to solve a complex information retrieval task when they assess the novelty and inventive step of claims made in a patent application. Given a claim, they search for prior art, which comprises all relevant publicly available information. This time-consuming task requires a deep understanding of the respective technical domain and the patent-domain-specific language. For these reasons, we address the computer-assisted search for prior art by creating a training dataset for supervised machine learning called PatentMatch. It contains pairs of claims from patent applications and semantically corresponding text passages of different degrees from cited patent documents. Each pair has been labeled by technically-skilled patent examiners from the European Patent Office. Accordingly, the label indicates the degree of semantic correspondence (matching), i.e., whether the text passage is prejudicial to the novelty of the claimed invention or not. Preliminary experiments using a baseline system show that PatentMatch can indeed be used for training a binary text pair classifier on this challenging information retrieval task. The dataset is available online: https://hpi.de/naumann/s/patentmatch.

E-commerce applications such as faceted product search or product comparison are based on structured product descriptions like attribute/value pairs. The vendors on e-commerce platforms do not provide structured product descriptions but describe offers using titles or descriptions. To process such offers, it is necessary to extract attribute/value pairs from textual product attributes. State-of-the-art attribute/value extraction techniques rely on pre-trained language models (PLMs), such as BERT. Two major drawbacks of these models for attribute/value extraction are that (i) the models require significant amounts of task-specific training data and (ii) the fine-tuned models face challenges in generalizing to attribute values not included in the training data. This paper explores the potential of large language models (LLMs) as a training data-efficient and robust alternative to PLM-based attribute/value extraction methods. We consider hosted LLMs, such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, as well as open-source LLMs based on Llama2. We evaluate the models in a zero-shot scenario and in a scenario where task-specific training data is available. In the zero-shot scenario, we compare various prompt designs for representing information about the target attributes of the extraction. In the scenario with training data, we investigate (i) the provision of example attribute values, (ii) the selection of in-context demonstrations, and (iii) the fine-tuning of GPT-3.5. Our experiments show that GPT-4 achieves an average F1-score of 85% on the two evaluation datasets while the best PLM-based techniques perform on average 5% worse using the same amount of training data. GPT-4 achieves a 10% higher F1-score than the best open-source LLM. The fine-tuned GPT-3.5 model reaches a similar performance as GPT-4 while being significantly more cost-efficient.

Enterprises often own large collections of structured data in the form of large databases or an enterprise data lake. Such data collections come with limited metadata and strict access policies that could limit access to the data contents and, therefore, limit the application of classic retrieval and analysis solutions. As a result, there is a need for solutions that can effectively utilize the available metadata. In this paper, we study the problem of matching table metadata to a business glossary containing data labels and descriptions. The resulting matching enables the use of an available or curated business glossary for retrieval and analysis without or before requesting access to the data contents. One solution to this problem is to use manually-defined rules or similarity measures on column names and glossary descriptions (or their vector embeddings) to find the closest match. However, such approaches need to be tuned through manual labeling and cannot handle many business glossaries that contain a combination of simple as well as complex and long descriptions. In this work, we leverage the power of large language models (LLMs) to design generic matching methods that do not require manual tuning and can identify complex relations between column names and glossaries. We propose methods that utilize LLMs in two ways: a) by generating additional context for column names that can aid with matching b) by using LLMs to directly infer if there is a relation between column names and glossary descriptions. Our preliminary experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

Archaeology is an intriguing domain for computer vision. It suffers not only from shortage in (labeled) data, but also from highly-challenging data, which is often extremely abraded and damaged. This paper proposes a novel semi-supervised model for classification and retrieval of images of archaeological artifacts. This model utilizes unique data that exists in the domain -- manual drawings made by special artists. These are used during training to implicitly transfer the domain knowledge from the drawings to their corresponding images, improving their classification results. We show that while learning how to classify, our model also learns how to generate drawings of the artifacts, an important documentation task, which is currently performed manually. Last but not least, we collected a new dataset of stamp-seals of the Southern Levant. The dataset and the code will be released upon acceptance.

Prompt-based fine-tuning has become an essential method for eliciting information encoded in pre-trained language models for a variety of tasks, including text classification. For multi-class classification tasks, prompt-based fine-tuning under low-resource scenarios has resulted in performance levels comparable to those of fully fine-tuning methods. Previous studies have used crafted prompt templates and verbalizers, mapping from the label terms space to the class space, to solve the classification problem as a masked language modeling task. However, cross-domain and fine-grained prompt-based fine-tuning with an automatically enriched verbalizer remains unexplored, mainly due to the difficulty and costs of manually selecting domain label terms for the verbalizer, which requires humans with domain expertise. To address this challenge, we introduce SciPrompt, a framework designed to automatically retrieve scientific topic-related terms for low-resource text classification tasks. To this end, we select semantically correlated and domain-specific label terms within the context of scientific literature for verbalizer augmentation. Furthermore, we propose a new verbalization strategy that uses correlation scores as additional weights to enhance the prediction performance of the language model during model tuning. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art, prompt-based fine-tuning methods on scientific text classification tasks under few and zero-shot settings, especially in classifying fine-grained and emerging scientific topics.

This paper shows how LLMs (Large Language Models) may be used to estimate a summary of the emotional state associated with piece of text. The summary of emotional state is a dictionary of words used to describe emotion together with the probability of the word appearing after a prompt comprising the original text and an emotion eliciting tail. Through emotion analysis of Amazon product reviews we demonstrate emotion descriptors can be mapped into a PCA type space. It was hoped that text descriptions of actions to improve a current text described state could also be elicited through a tail prompt. Experiment seemed to indicate that this is not straightforward to make work. This failure put our hoped for selection of action via choosing the best predict ed outcome via comparing emotional responses out of reach for the moment.

For monitoring crises, political events are extracted from the news. The large amount of unstructured full-text event descriptions makes a case-by-case analysis unmanageable, particularly for low-resource humanitarian aid organizations. This creates a demand to classify events into event types, a task referred to as event coding. Typically, domain experts craft an event type ontology, annotators label a large dataset and technical experts develop a supervised coding system. In this work, we propose PR-ENT, a new event coding approach that is more flexible and resource-efficient, while maintaining competitive accuracy: first, we extend an event description such as "Military injured two civilians'' by a template, e.g. "People were [Z]" and prompt a pre-trained (cloze) language model to fill the slot Z. Second, we select answer candidates Z* = {"injured'', "hurt"...} by treating the event description as premise and the filled templates as hypothesis in a textual entailment task. This allows domain experts to draft the codebook directly as labeled prompts and interpretable answer candidates. This human-in-the-loop process is guided by our interactive codebook design tool. We evaluate PR-ENT in several robustness checks: perturbing the event description and prompt template, restricting the vocabulary and removing contextual information.

In this study, we analyze data-scarce classification scenarios, where available labeled legal data is small and imbalanced, potentially hurting the quality of the results. We focused on two finetuning objectives; SetFit (Sentence Transformer Finetuning), a contrastive learning setup, and a vanilla finetuning setup on a legal provision classification task. Additionally, we compare the features that are extracted with LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations) to see which particular features contributed to the model's classification decisions. The results show that a contrastive setup with SetFit performed better than vanilla finetuning while using a fraction of the training samples. LIME results show that the contrastive learning approach helps boost both positive and negative features which are legally informative and contribute to the classification results. Thus a model finetuned with a contrastive objective seems to base its decisions more confidently on legally informative features.

Scientific document classification is a critical task and often involves many classes. However, collecting human-labeled data for many classes is expensive and usually leads to label-scarce scenarios. Moreover, recent work has shown that sentence embedding model fine-tuning for few-shot classification is efficient, robust, and effective. In this work, we propose FusionSent (Fusion-based Sentence Embedding Fine-tuning), an efficient and prompt-free approach for few-shot classification of scientific documents with many classes. FusionSent uses available training examples and their respective label texts to contrastively fine-tune two different sentence embedding models. Afterward, the parameters of both fine-tuned models are fused to combine the complementary knowledge from the separate fine-tuning steps into a single model. Finally, the resulting sentence embedding model is frozen to embed the training instances, which are then used as input features to train a classification head. Our experiments show that FusionSent significantly outperforms strong baselines by an average of 6.0 F_{1} points across multiple scientific document classification datasets. In addition, we introduce a new dataset for multi-label classification of scientific documents, which contains 183,565 scientific articles and 130 classes from the arXiv category taxonomy. Code and data are available at https://github.com/sebischair/FusionSent.

Many methods now exist for conditioning model outputs on task instructions, retrieved documents, and user-provided explanations and feedback. Rather than relying solely on examples of task inputs and outputs, these approaches use valuable additional data for improving model correctness and aligning learned models with human priors. Meanwhile, a growing body of evidence suggests that some language models can (1) store a large amount of knowledge in their parameters, and (2) perform inference over tasks in textual inputs at test time. These results raise the possibility that, for some tasks, humans cannot explain to a model any more about the task than it already knows or could infer on its own. In this paper, we study the circumstances under which explanations of individual data points can (or cannot) improve modeling performance. In order to carefully control important properties of the data and explanations, we introduce a synthetic dataset for experiments, and we also make use of three existing datasets with explanations: e-SNLI, TACRED, and SemEval. We first give a formal framework for the available modeling approaches, in which explanation data can be used as model inputs, as targets, or as a prior. After arguing that the most promising role for explanation data is as model inputs, we propose to use a retrieval-based method and show that it solves our synthetic task with accuracies upwards of 95%, while baselines without explanation data achieve below 65% accuracy. We then identify properties of datasets for which retrieval-based modeling fails. With the three existing datasets, we find no improvements from explanation retrieval. Drawing on findings from our synthetic task, we suggest that at least one of six preconditions for successful modeling fails to hold with these datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/peterbhase/ExplanationRoles

This case study investigates the task of job classification in a real-world setting, where the goal is to determine whether an English-language job posting is appropriate for a graduate or entry-level position. We explore multiple approaches to text classification, including supervised approaches such as traditional models like Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and state-of-the-art deep learning methods such as DeBERTa. We compare them with Large Language Models (LLMs) used in both few-shot and zero-shot classification settings. To accomplish this task, we employ prompt engineering, a technique that involves designing prompts to guide the LLMs towards the desired output. Specifically, we evaluate the performance of two commercially available state-of-the-art GPT-3.5-based language models, text-davinci-003 and gpt-3.5-turbo. We also conduct a detailed analysis of the impact of different aspects of prompt engineering on the model's performance. Our results show that, with a well-designed prompt, a zero-shot gpt-3.5-turbo classifier outperforms all other models, achieving a 6% increase in Precision@95% Recall compared to the best supervised approach. Furthermore, we observe that the wording of the prompt is a critical factor in eliciting the appropriate "reasoning" in the model, and that seemingly minor aspects of the prompt significantly affect the model's performance.

Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) has become a critical research problem in recent years. A typical example of a TAG is a paper citation graph, where the text of each paper serves as node attributes. Initial graph neural network (GNN) pipelines handled these text attributes by transforming them into shallow or hand-crafted features, such as skip-gram or bag-of-words features. Recent efforts have focused on enhancing these pipelines with language models (LMs), which typically demand intricate designs and substantial computational resources. With the advent of powerful large language models (LLMs) such as GPT or Llama2, which demonstrate an ability to reason and to utilize general knowledge, there is a growing need for techniques which combine the textual modelling abilities of LLMs with the structural learning capabilities of GNNs. Hence, in this work, we focus on leveraging LLMs to capture textual information as features, which can be used to boost GNN performance on downstream tasks. A key innovation is our use of explanations as features: we prompt an LLM to perform zero-shot classification, request textual explanations for its decision-making process, and design an LLM-to-LM interpreter to translate these explanations into informative features for downstream GNNs. Our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on well-established TAG datasets, including Cora, PubMed, ogbn-arxiv, as well as our newly introduced dataset, tape-arxiv23. Furthermore, our method significantly speeds up training, achieving a 2.88 times improvement over the closest baseline on ogbn-arxiv. Lastly, we believe the versatility of the proposed method extends beyond TAGs and holds the potential to enhance other tasks involving graph-text data. Our codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/XiaoxinHe/TAPE.

In the field of language modeling, models augmented with retrieval components have emerged as a promising solution to address several challenges faced in the natural language processing (NLP) field, including knowledge grounding, interpretability, and scalability. Despite the primary focus on NLP, we posit that the paradigm of retrieval-enhancement can be extended to a broader spectrum of machine learning (ML) such as computer vision, time series prediction, and computational biology. Therefore, this work introduces a formal framework of this paradigm, Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning (REML), by synthesizing the literature in various domains in ML with consistent notations which is missing from the current literature. Also, we found that while a number of studies employ retrieval components to augment their models, there is a lack of integration with foundational Information Retrieval (IR) research. We bridge this gap between the seminal IR research and contemporary REML studies by investigating each component that comprises the REML framework. Ultimately, the goal of this work is to equip researchers across various disciplines with a comprehensive, formally structured framework of retrieval-enhanced models, thereby fostering interdisciplinary future research.

Existing models based on artificial neural networks (ANNs) for sentence classification often do not incorporate the context in which sentences appear, and classify sentences individually. However, traditional sentence classification approaches have been shown to greatly benefit from jointly classifying subsequent sentences, such as with conditional random fields. In this work, we present an ANN architecture that combines the effectiveness of typical ANN models to classify sentences in isolation, with the strength of structured prediction. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on two different datasets for sequential sentence classification in medical abstracts.

This paper surveys and organizes research works in a new paradigm in natural language processing, which we dub "prompt-based learning". Unlike traditional supervised learning, which trains a model to take in an input x and predict an output y as P(y|x), prompt-based learning is based on language models that model the probability of text directly. To use these models to perform prediction tasks, the original input x is modified using a template into a textual string prompt x' that has some unfilled slots, and then the language model is used to probabilistically fill the unfilled information to obtain a final string x, from which the final output y can be derived. This framework is powerful and attractive for a number of reasons: it allows the language model to be pre-trained on massive amounts of raw text, and by defining a new prompting function the model is able to perform few-shot or even zero-shot learning, adapting to new scenarios with few or no labeled data. In this paper we introduce the basics of this promising paradigm, describe a unified set of mathematical notations that can cover a wide variety of existing work, and organize existing work along several dimensions, e.g.the choice of pre-trained models, prompts, and tuning strategies. To make the field more accessible to interested beginners, we not only make a systematic review of existing works and a highly structured typology of prompt-based concepts, but also release other resources, e.g., a website http://pretrain.nlpedia.ai/ including constantly-updated survey, and paperlist.

In this work, we introduce L3Cube-IndicNews, a multilingual text classification corpus aimed at curating a high-quality dataset for Indian regional languages, with a specific focus on news headlines and articles. We have centered our work on 10 prominent Indic languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Odia, Malayalam, and Punjabi. Each of these news datasets comprises 10 or more classes of news articles. L3Cube-IndicNews offers 3 distinct datasets tailored to handle different document lengths that are classified as: Short Headlines Classification (SHC) dataset containing the news headline and news category, Long Document Classification (LDC) dataset containing the whole news article and the news category, and Long Paragraph Classification (LPC) containing sub-articles of the news and the news category. We maintain consistent labeling across all 3 datasets for in-depth length-based analysis. We evaluate each of these Indic language datasets using 4 different models including monolingual BERT, multilingual Indic Sentence BERT (IndicSBERT), and IndicBERT. This research contributes significantly to expanding the pool of available text classification datasets and also makes it possible to develop topic classification models for Indian regional languages. This also serves as an excellent resource for cross-lingual analysis owing to the high overlap of labels among languages. The datasets and models are shared publicly at https://github.com/l3cube-pune/indic-nlp

As LLMs rapidly advance, increasing concerns arise regarding risks about actual authorship of texts we see online and in real world. The task of distinguishing LLM-authored texts is complicated by the nuanced and overlapping behaviors of both machines and humans. In this paper, we challenge the current practice of considering LLM-generated text detection a binary classification task of differentiating human from AI. Instead, we introduce a novel ternary text classification scheme, adding an "undecided" category for texts that could be attributed to either source, and we show that this new category is crucial to understand how to make the detection result more explainable to lay users. This research shifts the paradigm from merely classifying to explaining machine-generated texts, emphasizing need for detectors to provide clear and understandable explanations to users. Our study involves creating four new datasets comprised of texts from various LLMs and human authors. Based on new datasets, we performed binary classification tests to ascertain the most effective SOTA detection methods and identified SOTA LLMs capable of producing harder-to-detect texts. We constructed a new dataset of texts generated by two top-performing LLMs and human authors, and asked three human annotators to produce ternary labels with explanation notes. This dataset was used to investigate how three top-performing SOTA detectors behave in new ternary classification context. Our results highlight why "undecided" category is much needed from the viewpoint of explainability. Additionally, we conducted an analysis of explainability of the three best-performing detectors and the explanation notes of the human annotators, revealing insights about the complexity of explainable detection of machine-generated texts. Finally, we propose guidelines for developing future detection systems with improved explanatory power.

Transforming unstructured text into structured and meaningful forms, organized by useful category labels, is a fundamental step in text mining for downstream analysis and application. However, most existing methods for producing label taxonomies and building text-based label classifiers still rely heavily on domain expertise and manual curation, making the process expensive and time-consuming. This is particularly challenging when the label space is under-specified and large-scale data annotations are unavailable. In this paper, we address these challenges with Large Language Models (LLMs), whose prompt-based interface facilitates the induction and use of large-scale pseudo labels. We propose TnT-LLM, a two-phase framework that employs LLMs to automate the process of end-to-end label generation and assignment with minimal human effort for any given use-case. In the first phase, we introduce a zero-shot, multi-stage reasoning approach which enables LLMs to produce and refine a label taxonomy iteratively. In the second phase, LLMs are used as data labelers that yield training samples so that lightweight supervised classifiers can be reliably built, deployed, and served at scale. We apply TnT-LLM to the analysis of user intent and conversational domain for Bing Copilot (formerly Bing Chat), an open-domain chat-based search engine. Extensive experiments using both human and automatic evaluation metrics demonstrate that TnT-LLM generates more accurate and relevant label taxonomies when compared against state-of-the-art baselines, and achieves a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency for classification at scale. We also share our practical experiences and insights on the challenges and opportunities of using LLMs for large-scale text mining in real-world applications.

Text classification is an important task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), where the goal is to categorize text data into predefined classes. In this study, we analyse the dataset creation steps and evaluation techniques of multi-label news categorisation task as part of text classification. We first present a newly obtained dataset for Uzbek text classification, which was collected from 10 different news and press websites and covers 15 categories of news, press and law texts. We also present a comprehensive evaluation of different models, ranging from traditional bag-of-words models to deep learning architectures, on this newly created dataset. Our experiments show that the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based models outperform the rule-based models. The best performance is achieved by the BERTbek model, which is a transformer-based BERT model trained on the Uzbek corpus. Our findings provide a good baseline for further research in Uzbek text classification.

As a step toward better document-level understanding, we explore classification of a sequence of sentences into their corresponding categories, a task that requires understanding sentences in context of the document. Recent successful models for this task have used hierarchical models to contextualize sentence representations, and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) to incorporate dependencies between subsequent labels. In this work, we show that pretrained language models, BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) in particular, can be used for this task to capture contextual dependencies without the need for hierarchical encoding nor a CRF. Specifically, we construct a joint sentence representation that allows BERT Transformer layers to directly utilize contextual information from all words in all sentences. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on four datasets, including a new dataset of structured scientific abstracts.

We discover that DALLE-2 seems to have a hidden vocabulary that can be used to generate images with absurd prompts. For example, it seems that Apoploe vesrreaitais means birds and Contarra ccetnxniams luryca tanniounons (sometimes) means bugs or pests. We find that these prompts are often consistent in isolation but also sometimes in combinations. We present our black-box method to discover words that seem random but have some correspondence to visual concepts. This creates important security and interpretability challenges.

Extreme classification (XC) involves predicting over large numbers of classes (thousands to millions), with real-world applications like news article classification and e-commerce product tagging. The zero-shot version of this task requires generalization to novel classes without additional supervision. In this paper, we develop SemSup-XC, a model that achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot and few-shot performance on three XC datasets derived from legal, e-commerce, and Wikipedia data. To develop SemSup-XC, we use automatically collected semantic class descriptions to represent classes and facilitate generalization through a novel hybrid matching module that matches input instances to class descriptions using a combination of semantic and lexical similarity. Trained with contrastive learning, SemSup-XC significantly outperforms baselines and establishes state-of-the-art performance on all three datasets considered, gaining up to 12 precision points on zero-shot and more than 10 precision points on one-shot tests, with similar gains for recall@10. Our ablation studies highlight the relative importance of our hybrid matching module and automatically collected class descriptions.

Recent empirical works have successfully used unlabeled data to learn feature representations that are broadly useful in downstream classification tasks. Several of these methods are reminiscent of the well-known word2vec embedding algorithm: leveraging availability of pairs of semantically "similar" data points and "negative samples," the learner forces the inner product of representations of similar pairs with each other to be higher on average than with negative samples. The current paper uses the term contrastive learning for such algorithms and presents a theoretical framework for analyzing them by introducing latent classes and hypothesizing that semantically similar points are sampled from the same latent class. This framework allows us to show provable guarantees on the performance of the learned representations on the average classification task that is comprised of a subset of the same set of latent classes. Our generalization bound also shows that learned representations can reduce (labeled) sample complexity on downstream tasks. We conduct controlled experiments in both the text and image domains to support the theory.

Clickbait is the practice of engineering titles to incentivize readers to click through to articles. Such titles with sensationalized language reveal as little information as possible. Occasionally, clickbait will be intentionally misleading, so natural language processing (NLP) can scan the article and answer the question posed by the clickbait title, or spoil it. We tackle two tasks: classifying the clickbait into one of 3 types (Task 1), and spoiling the clickbait (Task 2). For Task 1, we propose two binary classifiers to determine the final spoiler type. For Task 2, we experiment with two approaches: using a question-answering model to identify the span of text of the spoiler, and using a large language model (LLM) to generate the spoiler. Because the spoiler is contained in the article, we frame the second task as a question-answering approach for identifying the starting and ending positions of the spoiler. We created models for Task 1 that were better than the baselines proposed by the dataset authors and engineered prompts for Task 2 that did not perform as well as the baselines proposed by the dataset authors due to the evaluation metric performing worse when the output text is from a generative model as opposed to an extractive model.

Researchers in the political and social sciences often rely on classification models to analyze trends in information consumption by examining browsing histories of millions of webpages. Automated scalable methods are necessary due to the impracticality of manual labeling. In this paper, we model the detection of topic-related content as a binary classification task and compare the accuracy of fine-tuned pre-trained encoder models against in-context learning strategies. Using only a few hundred annotated data points per topic, we detect content related to three German policies in a database of scraped webpages. We compare multilingual and monolingual models, as well as zero and few-shot approaches, and investigate the impact of negative sampling strategies and the combination of URL & content-based features. Our results show that a small sample of annotated data is sufficient to train an effective classifier. Fine-tuning encoder-based models yields better results than in-context learning. Classifiers using both URL & content-based features perform best, while using URLs alone provides adequate results when content is unavailable.

Learning job title representation is a vital process for developing automatic human resource tools. To do so, existing methods primarily rely on learning the title representation through skills extracted from the job description, neglecting the rich and diverse content within. Thus, we propose an alternative framework for learning job titles through their respective job description (JD) and utilize a Job Description Aggregator component to handle the lengthy description and bidirectional contrastive loss to account for the bidirectional relationship between the job title and its description. We evaluated the performance of our method on both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, achieving a superior performance over the skill-based approach.

We introduce \`A-la-carte Prompt Tuning (APT), a transformer-based scheme to tune prompts on distinct data so that they can be arbitrarily composed at inference time. The individual prompts can be trained in isolation, possibly on different devices, at different times, and on different distributions or domains. Furthermore each prompt only contains information about the subset of data it was exposed to during training. During inference, models can be assembled based on arbitrary selections of data sources, which we call "\`a-la-carte learning". \`A-la-carte learning enables constructing bespoke models specific to each user's individual access rights and preferences. We can add or remove information from the model by simply adding or removing the corresponding prompts without retraining from scratch. We demonstrate that \`a-la-carte built models achieve accuracy within 5% of models trained on the union of the respective sources, with comparable cost in terms of training and inference time. For the continual learning benchmarks Split CIFAR-100 and CORe50, we achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Legal judgment prediction is the task of automatically predicting the outcome of a court case, given a text describing the case's facts. Previous work on using neural models for this task has focused on Chinese; only feature-based models (e.g., using bags of words and topics) have been considered in English. We release a new English legal judgment prediction dataset, containing cases from the European Court of Human Rights. We evaluate a broad variety of neural models on the new dataset, establishing strong baselines that surpass previous feature-based models in three tasks: (1) binary violation classification; (2) multi-label classification; (3) case importance prediction. We also explore if models are biased towards demographic information via data anonymization. As a side-product, we propose a hierarchical version of BERT, which bypasses BERT's length limitation.

The continually increasing number of documents produced each year necessitates ever improving information processing methods for searching, retrieving, and organizing text. Central to these information processing methods is document classification, which has become an important application for supervised learning. Recently the performance of these traditional classifiers has degraded as the number of documents has increased. This is because along with this growth in the number of documents has come an increase in the number of categories. This paper approaches this problem differently from current document classification methods that view the problem as multi-class classification. Instead we perform hierarchical classification using an approach we call Hierarchical Deep Learning for Text classification (HDLTex). HDLTex employs stacks of deep learning architectures to provide specialized understanding at each level of the document hierarchy.

It is desirable to coarsely classify short scientific texts, such as grant or publication abstracts, for strategic insight or research portfolio management. These texts efficiently transmit dense information to experts possessing a rich body of knowledge to aid interpretation. Yet this task is remarkably difficult to automate because of brevity and the absence of context. To address this gap, we have developed a novel approach to generate and appropriately assign coarse domain-specific labels. We show that a Large Language Model (LLM) can provide metadata essential to the task, in a process akin to the augmentation of supplemental knowledge representing human intuition, and propose a workflow. As a pilot study, we use a corpus of award abstracts from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). We develop new assessment tools in concert with established performance metrics.

We here summarize our experience running a challenge with open data for musical genre recognition. Those notes motivate the task and the challenge design, show some statistics about the submissions, and present the results.

Artificial neural nets can represent and classify many types of data but are often tailored to particular applications -- e.g., for "fair" or "hierarchical" classification. Once an architecture has been selected, it is often difficult for humans to adjust models for a new task; for example, a hierarchical classifier cannot be easily transformed into a fair classifier that shields a protected field. Our contribution in this work is a new neural network architecture, the concept subspace network (CSN), which generalizes existing specialized classifiers to produce a unified model capable of learning a spectrum of multi-concept relationships. We demonstrate that CSNs reproduce state-of-the-art results in fair classification when enforcing concept independence, may be transformed into hierarchical classifiers, or even reconcile fairness and hierarchy within a single classifier. The CSN is inspired by existing prototype-based classifiers that promote interpretability.

In this paper, we introduce the Chinese AI and Law challenge dataset (CAIL2018), the first large-scale Chinese legal dataset for judgment prediction. \dataset contains more than 2.6 million criminal cases published by the Supreme People's Court of China, which are several times larger than other datasets in existing works on judgment prediction. Moreover, the annotations of judgment results are more detailed and rich. It consists of applicable law articles, charges, and prison terms, which are expected to be inferred according to the fact descriptions of cases. For comparison, we implement several conventional text classification baselines for judgment prediction and experimental results show that it is still a challenge for current models to predict the judgment results of legal cases, especially on prison terms. To help the researchers make improvements on legal judgment prediction, both \dataset and baselines will be released after the CAIL competitionhttp://cail.cipsc.org.cn/.

Music genre classification is one of the trending topics in regards to the current Music Information Retrieval (MIR) Research. Since, the dependency of genre is not only limited to the audio profile, we also make use of textual content provided as lyrics of the corresponding song. We implemented a CNN based feature extractor for spectrograms in order to incorporate the acoustic features and a Hierarchical Attention Network based feature extractor for lyrics. We then go on to classify the music track based upon the resulting fused feature vector.

In this work we build a stack of machine learning models aimed at composing a state-of-the-art credit rating and default prediction system, obtaining excellent out-of-sample performances. Our approach is an excursion through the most recent ML / AI concepts, starting from natural language processes (NLP) applied to economic sectors' (textual) descriptions using embedding and autoencoders (AE), going through the classification of defaultable firms on the base of a wide range of economic features using gradient boosting machines (GBM) and calibrating their probabilities paying due attention to the treatment of unbalanced samples. Finally we assign credit ratings through genetic algorithms (differential evolution, DE). Model interpretability is achieved by implementing recent techniques such as SHAP and LIME, which explain predictions locally in features' space.

Machine learning has opened up new tools for financial fraud detection. Using a sample of annotated transactions, a machine learning classification algorithm learns to detect frauds. With growing credit card transaction volumes and rising fraud percentages there is growing interest in finding appropriate machine learning classifiers for detection. However, fraud data sets are diverse and exhibit inconsistent characteristics. As a result, a model effective on a given data set is not guaranteed to perform on another. Further, the possibility of temporal drift in data patterns and characteristics over time is high. Additionally, fraud data has massive and varying imbalance. In this work, we evaluate sampling methods as a viable pre-processing mechanism to handle imbalance and propose a data-driven classifier selection strategy for characteristic highly imbalanced fraud detection data sets. The model derived based on our selection strategy surpasses peer models, whilst working in more realistic conditions, establishing the effectiveness of the strategy.

Textual domain is a crucial property within the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community due to its effects on downstream model performance. The concept itself is, however, loosely defined and, in practice, refers to any non-typological property, such as genre, topic, medium or style of a document. We investigate the core notion of domains via human proficiency in identifying related intrinsic textual properties, specifically the concepts of genre (communicative purpose) and topic (subject matter). We publish our annotations in *TGeGUM*: A collection of 9.1k sentences from the GUM dataset (Zeldes, 2017) with single sentence and larger context (i.e., prose) annotations for one of 11 genres (source type), and its topic/subtopic as per the Dewey Decimal library classification system (Dewey, 1979), consisting of 10/100 hierarchical topics of increased granularity. Each instance is annotated by three annotators, for a total of 32.7k annotations, allowing us to examine the level of human disagreement and the relative difficulty of each annotation task. With a Fleiss' kappa of at most 0.53 on the sentence level and 0.66 at the prose level, it is evident that despite the ubiquity of domains in NLP, there is little human consensus on how to define them. By training classifiers to perform the same task, we find that this uncertainty also extends to NLP models.

Automated machine learning (AutoML) is the sub-field of machine learning that aims at automating, to some extend, all stages of the design of a machine learning system. In the context of supervised learning, AutoML is concerned with feature extraction, pre processing, model design and post processing. Major contributions and achievements in AutoML have been taking place during the recent decade. We are therefore in perfect timing to look back and realize what we have learned. This chapter aims to summarize the main findings in the early years of AutoML. More specifically, in this chapter an introduction to AutoML for supervised learning is provided and an historical review of progress in this field is presented. Likewise, the main paradigms of AutoML are described and research opportunities are outlined.

Internet is one of the important inventions and a large number of persons are its users. These persons use this for different purposes. There are different social media platforms that are accessible to these users. Any user can make a post or spread the news through the online platforms. These platforms do not verify the users or their posts. So some of the users try to spread fake news through these platforms. These news can be propaganda against an individual, society, organization or political party. A human being is unable to detect all these fake news. So there is a need for machine learning classifiers that can detect these fake news automatically. Use of machine learning classifiers for detecting fake news is described in this systematic literature review.

In natural language processing (NLP), lexical function is a concept to unambiguously represent semantic and syntactic features of words and phrases in text first crafted in the Meaning-Text Theory. Hierarchical classification of lexical functions involves organizing these features into a tree-like hierarchy of categories or labels. This is a challenging task as it requires a good understanding of the context and the relationships among words and phrases in text. It also needs large amounts of labeled data to train language models effectively. In this paper, we present a dataset of most frequent Spanish verb-noun collocations and sentences where they occur, each collocation is assigned to one of 37 lexical functions defined as classes for a hierarchical classification task. Each class represents a relation between the noun and the verb in a collocation involving their semantic and syntactic features. We combine the classes in a tree-based structure, and introduce classification objectives for each level of the structure. The dataset was created by dependency tree parsing and matching of the phrases in Spanish news. We provide baselines and data splits for each objective.

We present our systems submitted for the shared tasks of Acronym Identification (AI) and Acronym Disambiguation (AD) held under Workshop on SDU. We mainly experiment with BERT and SciBERT. In addition, we assess the effectiveness of "BIOless" tagging and blending along with the prowess of ensembling in AI. For AD, we formulate the problem as a span prediction task, experiment with different training techniques and also leverage the use of external data. Our systems rank 11th and 3rd in AI and AD tasks respectively.

Social media is a great source of data for users reporting information and regarding their health and how various things have had an effect on them. This paper presents various approaches using Transformers and Large Language Models and their ensembles, their performance along with advantages and drawbacks for various tasks of SMM4H'24 - Classifying texts on impact of nature and outdoor spaces on the author's mental health (Task 3), Binary classification of tweets reporting their children's health disorders like Asthma, Autism, ADHD and Speech disorder (task 5), Binary classification of users self-reporting their age (task 6).

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation is a challenging task that requires segmenting novel object categories at inference time. Recent studies have explored vision-language pre-training to handle this task, but suffer from unrealistic assumptions in practical scenarios, i.e., low-quality textual category names. For example, this paradigm assumes that new textual categories will be accurately and completely provided, and exist in lexicons during pre-training. However, exceptions often happen when encountering ambiguity for brief or incomplete names, new words that are not present in the pre-trained lexicons, and difficult-to-describe categories for users. To address these issues, this work proposes a novel attribute decomposition-aggregation framework, AttrSeg, inspired by human cognition in understanding new concepts. Specifically, in the decomposition stage, we decouple class names into diverse attribute descriptions to complement semantic contexts from multiple perspectives. Two attribute construction strategies are designed: using large language models for common categories, and involving manually labeling for human-invented categories. In the aggregation stage, we group diverse attributes into an integrated global description, to form a discriminative classifier that distinguishes the target object from others. One hierarchical aggregation architecture is further proposed to achieve multi-level aggregations, leveraging the meticulously designed clustering module. The final results are obtained by computing the similarity between aggregated attributes and images embeddings. To evaluate the effectiveness, we annotate three types of datasets with attribute descriptions, and conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies. The results show the superior performance of attribute decomposition-aggregation.

Codification of free-text clinical narratives have long been recognised to be beneficial for secondary uses such as funding, insurance claim processing and research. The current scenario of assigning codes is a manual process which is very expensive, time-consuming and error prone. In recent years, many researchers have studied the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP), related Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) methods and techniques to resolve the problem of manual coding of clinical narratives and to assist human coders to assign clinical codes more accurately and efficiently. This systematic literature review provides a comprehensive overview of automated clinical coding systems that utilises appropriate NLP, ML and DL methods and techniques to assign ICD codes to discharge summaries. We have followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses(PRISMA) guidelines and conducted a comprehensive search of publications from January, 2010 to December 2020 in four academic databases- PubMed, ScienceDirect, Association for Computing Machinery(ACM) Digital Library, and the Association for Computational Linguistics(ACL) Anthology. We reviewed 7,556 publications; 38 met the inclusion criteria. This review identified: datasets having discharge summaries; NLP techniques along with some other data extraction processes, different feature extraction and embedding techniques. To measure the performance of classification methods, different evaluation metrics are used. Lastly, future research directions are provided to scholars who are interested in automated ICD code assignment. Efforts are still required to improve ICD code prediction accuracy, availability of large-scale de-identified clinical corpora with the latest version of the classification system. This can be a platform to guide and share knowledge with the less experienced coders and researchers.

In recent years supervised representation learning has provided state of the art or close to the state of the art results in semantic analysis tasks including ranking and information retrieval. The core idea is to learn how to embed items into a latent space such that they optimize a supervised objective in that latent space. The dimensions of the latent space have no clear semantics, and this reduces the interpretability of the system. For example, in personalization models, it is hard to explain why a particular item is ranked high for a given user profile. We propose a novel model of representation learning called Supervised Explicit Semantic Analysis (SESA) that is trained in a supervised fashion to embed items to a set of dimensions with explicit semantics. The model learns to compare two objects by representing them in this explicit space, where each dimension corresponds to a concept from a knowledge base. This work extends Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) with a supervised model for ranking problems. We apply this model to the task of Job-Profile relevance in LinkedIn in which a set of skills defines our explicit dimensions of the space. Every profile and job are encoded to this set of skills their similarity is calculated in this space. We use RNNs to embed text input into this space. In addition to interpretability, our model makes use of the web-scale collaborative skills data that is provided by users for each LinkedIn profile. Our model provides state of the art result while it remains interpretable.

This study provides an efficient approach for using text data to calculate patent-to-patent (p2p) technological similarity, and presents a hybrid framework for leveraging the resulting p2p similarity for applications such as semantic search and automated patent classification. We create embeddings using Sentence-BERT (SBERT) based on patent claims. We leverage SBERTs efficiency in creating embedding distance measures to map p2p similarity in large sets of patent data. We deploy our framework for classification with a simple Nearest Neighbors (KNN) model that predicts Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) of a patent based on the class assignment of the K patents with the highest p2p similarity. We thereby validate that the p2p similarity captures their technological features in terms of CPC overlap, and at the same demonstrate the usefulness of this approach for automatic patent classification based on text data. Furthermore, the presented classification framework is simple and the results easy to interpret and evaluate by end-users. In the out-of-sample model validation, we are able to perform a multi-label prediction of all assigned CPC classes on the subclass (663) level on 1,492,294 patents with an accuracy of 54% and F1 score > 66%, which suggests that our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art in text-based multi-label and multi-class patent classification. We furthermore discuss the applicability of the presented framework for semantic IP search, patent landscaping, and technology intelligence. We finally point towards a future research agenda for leveraging multi-source patent embeddings, their appropriateness across applications, as well as to improve and validate patent embeddings by creating domain-expert curated Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmark datasets.

Electronic health records (EHR) contain narrative notes that provide extensive details on the medical condition and management of patients. Natural language processing (NLP) of clinical notes can use observed frequencies of clinical terms as predictive features for downstream applications such as clinical decision making and patient trajectory prediction. However, due to the vast number of highly similar and related clinical concepts, a more effective modeling strategy is to represent clinical terms as semantic embeddings via representation learning and use the low dimensional embeddings as feature vectors for predictive modeling. To achieve efficient representation, fine-tuning pretrained language models with biomedical knowledge graphs may generate better embeddings for biomedical terms than those from standard language models alone. These embeddings can effectively discriminate synonymous pairs of from those that are unrelated. However, they often fail to capture different degrees of similarity or relatedness for concepts that are hierarchical in nature. To overcome this limitation, we propose HiPrBERT, a novel biomedical term representation model trained on additionally complied data that contains hierarchical structures for various biomedical terms. We modify an existing contrastive loss function to extract information from these hierarchies. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that HiPrBERT effectively learns the pair-wise distance from hierarchical information, resulting in a substantially more informative embeddings for further biomedical applications

Multi-document summarization (MDS) is a difficult task in Natural Language Processing, aiming to summarize information from several documents. However, the source documents are often insufficient to obtain a qualitative summary. We propose a retriever-guided model combined with non-parametric memory for summary generation. This model retrieves relevant candidates from a database and then generates the summary considering the candidates with a copy mechanism and the source documents. The retriever is implemented with Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANN) to search large databases. Our method is evaluated on the MultiXScience dataset which includes scientific articles. Finally, we discuss our results and possible directions for future work.

With the rise of the Internet, there is a growing need to build intelligent systems that are capable of efficiently dealing with early risk detection (ERD) problems on social media, such as early depression detection, early rumor detection or identification of sexual predators. These systems, nowadays mostly based on machine learning techniques, must be able to deal with data streams since users provide their data over time. In addition, these systems must be able to decide when the processed data is sufficient to actually classify users. Moreover, since ERD tasks involve risky decisions by which people's lives could be affected, such systems must also be able to justify their decisions. However, most standard and state-of-the-art supervised machine learning models are not well suited to deal with this scenario. This is due to the fact that they either act as black boxes or do not support incremental classification/learning. In this paper we introduce SS3, a novel supervised learning model for text classification that naturally supports these aspects. SS3 was designed to be used as a general framework to deal with ERD problems. We evaluated our model on the CLEF's eRisk2017 pilot task on early depression detection. Most of the 30 contributions submitted to this competition used state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that our classifier was able to outperform these models and standard classifiers, despite being less computationally expensive and having the ability to explain its rationale.

Many machine learning algorithms require the input to be represented as a fixed-length feature vector. When it comes to texts, one of the most common fixed-length features is bag-of-words. Despite their popularity, bag-of-words features have two major weaknesses: they lose the ordering of the words and they also ignore semantics of the words. For example, "powerful," "strong" and "Paris" are equally distant. In this paper, we propose Paragraph Vector, an unsupervised algorithm that learns fixed-length feature representations from variable-length pieces of texts, such as sentences, paragraphs, and documents. Our algorithm represents each document by a dense vector which is trained to predict words in the document. Its construction gives our algorithm the potential to overcome the weaknesses of bag-of-words models. Empirical results show that Paragraph Vectors outperform bag-of-words models as well as other techniques for text representations. Finally, we achieve new state-of-the-art results on several text classification and sentiment analysis tasks.

We present the Multilingual Amazon Reviews Corpus (MARC), a large-scale collection of Amazon reviews for multilingual text classification. The corpus contains reviews in English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, and Chinese, which were collected between 2015 and 2019. Each record in the dataset contains the review text, the review title, the star rating, an anonymized reviewer ID, an anonymized product ID, and the coarse-grained product category (e.g., 'books', 'appliances', etc.) The corpus is balanced across the 5 possible star ratings, so each rating constitutes 20% of the reviews in each language. For each language, there are 200,000, 5,000, and 5,000 reviews in the training, development, and test sets, respectively. We report baseline results for supervised text classification and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning by fine-tuning a multilingual BERT model on reviews data. We propose the use of mean absolute error (MAE) instead of classification accuracy for this task, since MAE accounts for the ordinal nature of the ratings.

Learning to represent free text is a core task in many clinical machine learning (ML) applications, as clinical text contains observations and plans not otherwise available for inference. State-of-the-art methods use large language models developed with immense computational resources and training data; however, applying these models is challenging because of the highly varying syntax and vocabulary in clinical free text. Structured information such as International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes often succinctly abstracts the most important facts of a clinical encounter and yields good performance, but is often not as available as clinical text in real-world scenarios. We propose a multi-view learning framework that jointly learns from codes and text to combine the availability and forward-looking nature of text and better performance of ICD codes. The learned text embeddings can be used as inputs to predictive algorithms independent of the ICD codes during inference. Our approach uses a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to process ICD codes, and Bi-LSTM to process text. We apply Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis (DCCA) to enforce the two views to learn a similar representation of each patient. In experiments using planned surgical procedure text, our model outperforms BERT models fine-tuned to clinical data, and in experiments using diverse text in MIMIC-III, our model is competitive to a fine-tuned BERT at a tiny fraction of its computational effort.

We present a new approach for mitigating unfairness in learned classifiers. In particular, we focus on binary classification tasks over individuals from two populations, where, as our criterion for fairness, we wish to achieve similar false positive rates in both populations, and similar false negative rates in both populations. As a proof of concept, we implement our approach and empirically evaluate its ability to achieve both fairness and accuracy, using datasets from the fields of criminal risk assessment, credit, lending, and college admissions.

E-commerce search and recommendation usually operate on structured data such as product catalogs and taxonomies. However, creating better search and recommendation systems often requires a large variety of unstructured data including customer reviews and articles on the web. Traditionally, the solution has always been converting unstructured data into structured data through information extraction, and conducting search over the structured data. However, this is a costly approach that often has low quality. In this paper, we envision a solution that does entirely the opposite. Instead of converting unstructured data (web pages, customer reviews, etc) to structured data, we instead convert structured data (product inventory, catalogs, taxonomies, etc) into textual data, which can be easily integrated into the text corpus that trains LLMs. Then, search and recommendation can be performed through a Q/A mechanism through an LLM instead of using traditional information retrieval methods over structured data.

Survey data can contain a high number of features while having a comparatively low quantity of examples. Machine learning models that attempt to predict outcomes from survey data under these conditions can overfit and result in poor generalizability. One remedy to this issue is feature selection, which attempts to select an optimal subset of features to learn upon. A relatively unexplored source of information in the feature selection process is the usage of textual names of features, which may be semantically indicative of which features are relevant to a target outcome. The relationships between feature names and target names can be evaluated using language models (LMs) to produce semantic textual similarity (STS) scores, which can then be used to select features. We examine the performance using STS to select features directly and in the minimal-redundancy-maximal-relevance (mRMR) algorithm. The performance of STS as a feature selection metric is evaluated against preliminary survey data collected as a part of a clinical study on persistent post-surgical pain (PPSP). The results suggest that features selected with STS can result in higher performance models compared to traditional feature selection algorithms.

We present our submission to the AXOLOTL-24 shared task. The shared task comprises two subtasks: identifying new senses that words gain with time (when comparing newer and older time periods) and producing the definitions for the identified new senses. We implemented a conceptually simple and computationally inexpensive solution to both subtasks. We trained adapter-based binary classification models to match glosses with usage examples and leveraged the probability output of the models to identify novel senses. The same models were used to match examples of novel sense usages with Wiktionary definitions. Our submission attained third place on the first subtask and the first place on the second subtask.

In domains with high stakes such as law, recruitment, and healthcare, learning models frequently rely on sensitive user data for inference, necessitating the complete set of features. This not only poses significant privacy risks for individuals but also demands substantial human effort from organizations to verify information accuracy. This paper asks whether it is necessary to use all input features for accurate predictions at inference time. The paper demonstrates that, in a personalized setting, individuals may only need to disclose a small subset of their features without compromising decision-making accuracy. The paper also provides an efficient sequential algorithm to determine the appropriate attributes for each individual to provide. Evaluations across various learning tasks show that individuals can potentially report as little as 10\% of their information while maintaining the same accuracy level as a model that employs the full set of user information.

This article introduces byteSteady -- a fast model for classification using byte-level n-gram embeddings. byteSteady assumes that each input comes as a sequence of bytes. A representation vector is produced using the averaged embedding vectors of byte-level n-grams, with a pre-defined set of n. The hashing trick is used to reduce the number of embedding vectors. This input representation vector is then fed into a linear classifier. A straightforward application of byteSteady is text classification. We also apply byteSteady to one type of non-language data -- DNA sequences for gene classification. For both problems we achieved competitive classification results against strong baselines, suggesting that byteSteady can be applied to both language and non-language data. Furthermore, we find that simple compression using Huffman coding does not significantly impact the results, which offers an accuracy-speed trade-off previously unexplored in machine learning.

Real-world classifiers can benefit from the option of abstaining from predicting on samples where they have low confidence. Such abstention is particularly useful on samples which are close to the learned decision boundary, or which are outliers with respect to the training sample. These settings have been the subject of extensive but disjoint study in the selective classification (SC) and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection literature. Recent work on selective classification with OOD detection (SCOD) has argued for the unified study of these problems; however, the formal underpinnings of this problem are still nascent, and existing techniques are heuristic in nature. In this paper, we propose new plugin estimators for SCOD that are theoretically grounded, effective, and generalise existing approaches from the SC and OOD detection literature. In the course of our analysis, we formally explicate how na\"{i}ve use of existing SC and OOD detection baselines may be inadequate for SCOD. We empirically demonstrate that our approaches yields competitive SC and OOD detection performance compared to baselines from both literatures.

Large Language Models (LLM) have made significant advances in the recent past becoming more mainstream in Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled human-facing applications. However, LLMs often generate stereotypical output inherited from historical data, amplifying societal biases and raising ethical concerns. This work introduces i) the Multi-Grain Stereotype Dataset, which includes 52,751 instances of gender, race, profession and religion stereotypic text and ii) a novel stereotype classifier for English text. We design several experiments to rigorously test the proposed model trained on the novel dataset. Our experiments show that training the model in a multi-class setting can outperform the one-vs-all binary counterpart. Consistent feature importance signals from different eXplainable AI tools demonstrate that the new model exploits relevant text features. We utilise the newly created model to assess the stereotypic behaviour of the popular GPT family of models and observe the reduction of bias over time. In summary, our work establishes a robust and practical framework for auditing and evaluating the stereotypic bias in LLM.

Recent works have extended notions of feature importance to semantic concepts that are inherently interpretable to the users interacting with a black-box predictive model. Yet, precise statistical guarantees, such as false positive rate control, are needed to communicate findings transparently and to avoid unintended consequences in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we formalize the global (i.e., over a population) and local (i.e., for a sample) statistical importance of semantic concepts for the predictions of opaque models, by means of conditional independence, which allows for rigorous testing. We use recent ideas of sequential kernelized testing (SKIT) to induce a rank of importance across concepts, and showcase the effectiveness and flexibility of our framework on synthetic datasets as well as on image classification tasks using vision-language models such as CLIP.

Automatic coding of International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is a multi-label text categorization task that involves extracting disease or procedure codes from clinical notes. Despite the application of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) techniques, there are still challenges including limited availability of data due to privacy constraints and the high variability of clinical notes caused by different writing habits of medical professionals and various pathological features of patients. In this work, we investigate the semi-structured nature of clinical notes and propose an automatic algorithm to segment them into sections. To address the variability issues in existing ICD coding models with limited data, we introduce a contrastive pre-training approach on sections using a soft multi-label similarity metric based on tree edit distance. Additionally, we design a masked section training strategy to enable ICD coding models to locate sections related to ICD codes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed training strategies effectively enhance the performance of existing ICD coding methods.

In this research. we analyze the potential of Feature Density (HD) as a way to comparatively estimate machine learning (ML) classifier performance prior to training. The goal of the study is to aid in solving the problem of resource-intensive training of ML models which is becoming a serious issue due to continuously increasing dataset sizes and the ever rising popularity of Deep Neural Networks (DNN). The issue of constantly increasing demands for more powerful computational resources is also affecting the environment, as training large-scale ML models are causing alarmingly-growing amounts of CO2, emissions. Our approach 1s to optimize the resource-intensive training of ML models for Natural Language Processing to reduce the number of required experiments iterations. We expand on previous attempts on improving classifier training efficiency with FD while also providing an insight to the effectiveness of various linguistically-backed feature preprocessing methods for dialog classification, specifically cyberbullying detection.

In this paper, we discuss the methods we applied at SemEval-2023 Task 10: Towards the Explainable Detection of Online Sexism. Given an input text, we perform three classification tasks to predict whether the text is sexist and classify the sexist text into subcategories in order to provide an additional explanation as to why the text is sexist. We explored many different types of models, including GloVe embeddings as the baseline approach, transformer-based deep learning models like BERT, RoBERTa, and DeBERTa, ensemble models, and model blending. We explored various data cleaning and augmentation methods to improve model performance. Pre-training transformer models yielded significant improvements in performance, and ensembles and blending slightly improved robustness in the F1 score.

The Russian Drug Reaction Corpus (RuDReC) is a new partially annotated corpus of consumer reviews in Russian about pharmaceutical products for the detection of health-related named entities and the effectiveness of pharmaceutical products. The corpus itself consists of two parts, the raw one and the labelled one. The raw part includes 1.4 million health-related user-generated texts collected from various Internet sources, including social media. The labelled part contains 500 consumer reviews about drug therapy with drug- and disease-related information. Labels for sentences include health-related issues or their absence. The sentences with one are additionally labelled at the expression level for identification of fine-grained subtypes such as drug classes and drug forms, drug indications, and drug reactions. Further, we present a baseline model for named entity recognition (NER) and multi-label sentence classification tasks on this corpus. The macro F1 score of 74.85% in the NER task was achieved by our RuDR-BERT model. For the sentence classification task, our model achieves the macro F1 score of 68.82% gaining 7.47% over the score of BERT model trained on Russian data. We make the RuDReC corpus and pretrained weights of domain-specific BERT models freely available at https://github.com/cimm-kzn/RuDReC

We introduce Latent Meaning Cells, a deep latent variable model which learns contextualized representations of words by combining local lexical context and metadata. Metadata can refer to granular context, such as section type, or to more global context, such as unique document ids. Reliance on metadata for contextualized representation learning is apropos in the clinical domain where text is semi-structured and expresses high variation in topics. We evaluate the LMC model on the task of zero-shot clinical acronym expansion across three datasets. The LMC significantly outperforms a diverse set of baselines at a fraction of the pre-training cost and learns clinically coherent representations. We demonstrate that not only is metadata itself very helpful for the task, but that the LMC inference algorithm provides an additional large benefit.

The existing event classification (EC) work primarily focuseson the traditional supervised learning setting in which models are unableto extract event mentions of new/unseen event types. Few-shot learninghas not been investigated in this area although it enables EC models toextend their operation to unobserved event types. To fill in this gap, inthis work, we investigate event classification under the few-shot learningsetting. We propose a novel training method for this problem that exten-sively exploit the support set during the training process of a few-shotlearning model. In particular, in addition to matching the query exam-ple with those in the support set for training, we seek to further matchthe examples within the support set themselves. This method providesmore training signals for the models and can be applied to every metric-learning-based few-shot learning methods. Our extensive experiments ontwo benchmark EC datasets show that the proposed method can improvethe best reported few-shot learning models by up to 10% on accuracyfor event classification

Traditional text classification approaches often require a good amount of labeled data, which is difficult to obtain, especially in restricted domains or less widespread languages. This lack of labeled data has led to the rise of low-resource methods, that assume low data availability in natural language processing. Among them, zero-shot learning stands out, which consists of learning a classifier without any previously labeled data. The best results reported with this approach use language models such as Transformers, but fall into two problems: high execution time and inability to handle long texts as input. This paper proposes a new model, ZeroBERTo, which leverages an unsupervised clustering step to obtain a compressed data representation before the classification task. We show that ZeroBERTo has better performance for long inputs and shorter execution time, outperforming XLM-R by about 12% in the F1 score in the FolhaUOL dataset. Keywords: Low-Resource NLP, Unlabeled data, Zero-Shot Learning, Topic Modeling, Transformers.

Short text classification is a crucial and challenging aspect of Natural Language Processing. For this reason, there are numerous highly specialized short text classifiers. However, in recent short text research, State of the Art (SOTA) methods for traditional text classification, particularly the pure use of Transformers, have been unexploited. In this work, we examine the performance of a variety of short text classifiers as well as the top performing traditional text classifier. We further investigate the effects on two new real-world short text datasets in an effort to address the issue of becoming overly dependent on benchmark datasets with a limited number of characteristics. Our experiments unambiguously demonstrate that Transformers achieve SOTA accuracy on short text classification tasks, raising the question of whether specialized short text techniques are necessary.

Political scientists often grapple with data scarcity in text classification. Recently, fine-tuned BERT models and their variants have gained traction as effective solutions to address this issue. In this study, we investigate the potential of GPT-based models combined with prompt engineering as a viable alternative. We conduct a series of experiments across various classification tasks, differing in the number of classes and complexity, to evaluate the effectiveness of BERT-based versus GPT-based models in low-data scenarios. Our findings indicate that while zero-shot and few-shot learning with GPT models provide reasonable performance and are well-suited for early-stage research exploration, they generally fall short - or, at best, match - the performance of BERT fine-tuning, particularly as the training set reaches a substantial size (e.g., 1,000 samples). We conclude by comparing these approaches in terms of performance, ease of use, and cost, providing practical guidance for researchers facing data limitations. Our results are particularly relevant for those engaged in quantitative text analysis in low-resource settings or with limited labeled data.

As free online encyclopedias with massive volumes of content, Wikipedia and Wikidata are key to many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as information retrieval, knowledge base building, machine translation, text classification, and text summarization. In this paper, we introduce WikiDes, a novel dataset to generate short descriptions of Wikipedia articles for the problem of text summarization. The dataset consists of over 80k English samples on 6987 topics. We set up a two-phase summarization method - description generation (Phase I) and candidate ranking (Phase II) - as a strong approach that relies on transfer and contrastive learning. For description generation, T5 and BART show their superiority compared to other small-scale pre-trained models. By applying contrastive learning with the diverse input from beam search, the metric fusion-based ranking models outperform the direct description generation models significantly up to 22 ROUGE in topic-exclusive split and topic-independent split. Furthermore, the outcome descriptions in Phase II are supported by human evaluation in over 45.33% chosen compared to 23.66% in Phase I against the gold descriptions. In the aspect of sentiment analysis, the generated descriptions cannot effectively capture all sentiment polarities from paragraphs while doing this task better from the gold descriptions. The automatic generation of new descriptions reduces the human efforts in creating them and enriches Wikidata-based knowledge graphs. Our paper shows a practical impact on Wikipedia and Wikidata since there are thousands of missing descriptions. Finally, we expect WikiDes to be a useful dataset for related works in capturing salient information from short paragraphs. The curated dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/declare-lab/WikiDes.

Understanding how semantic meaning is encoded in the representation spaces of large language models is a fundamental problem in interpretability. In this paper, we study the two foundational questions in this area. First, how are categorical concepts, such as {'mammal', 'bird', 'reptile', 'fish'}, represented? Second, how are hierarchical relations between concepts encoded? For example, how is the fact that 'dog' is a kind of 'mammal' encoded? We show how to extend the linear representation hypothesis to answer these questions. We find a remarkably simple structure: simple categorical concepts are represented as simplices, hierarchically related concepts are orthogonal in a sense we make precise, and (in consequence) complex concepts are represented as polytopes constructed from direct sums of simplices, reflecting the hierarchical structure. We validate these theoretical results on the Gemma large language model, estimating representations for 957 hierarchically related concepts using data from WordNet.

We develop a method for training small-scale (under 100M parameter) neural information retrieval models with as few as 10 gold relevance labels. The method depends on generating synthetic queries for documents using a language model (LM), and the key step is that we automatically optimize the LM prompt that is used to generate these queries based on training quality. In experiments with the BIRCO benchmark, we find that models trained with our method outperform RankZephyr and are competitive with RankLLama, both of which are 7B parameter models trained on over 100K labels. These findings point to the power of automatic prompt optimization for synthetic dataset generation.

Recognizing the flow of time in a story is a crucial aspect of understanding it. Prior work related to time has primarily focused on identifying temporal expressions or relative sequencing of events, but here we propose computationally annotating each line of a book with wall clock times, even in the absence of explicit time-descriptive phrases. To do so, we construct a data set of hourly time phrases from 52,183 fictional books. We then construct a time-of-day classification model that achieves an average error of 2.27 hours. Furthermore, we show that by analyzing a book in whole using dynamic programming of breakpoints, we can roughly partition a book into segments that each correspond to a particular time-of-day. This approach improves upon baselines by over two hours. Finally, we apply our model to a corpus of literature categorized by different periods in history, to show interesting trends of hourly activity throughout the past. Among several observations we find that the fraction of events taking place past 10 P.M jumps past 1880 - coincident with the advent of the electric light bulb and city lights.

Recommender systems play a significant role in information filtering and have been utilized in different scenarios, such as e-commerce and social media. With the prosperity of deep learning, deep recommender systems show superior performance by capturing non-linear information and item-user relationships. However, the design of deep recommender systems heavily relies on human experiences and expert knowledge. To tackle this problem, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is introduced to automatically search for the proper candidates for different parts of deep recommender systems. This survey performs a comprehensive review of the literature in this field. Firstly, we propose an abstract concept for AutoML for deep recommender systems (AutoRecSys) that describes its building blocks and distinguishes it from conventional AutoML techniques and recommender systems. Secondly, we present a taxonomy as a classification framework containing feature selection search, embedding dimension search, feature interaction search, model architecture search, and other components search. Furthermore, we put a particular emphasis on the search space and search strategy, as they are the common thread to connect all methods within each category and enable practitioners to analyze and compare various approaches. Finally, we propose four future promising research directions that will lead this line of research.

This paper demonstrates how the limitations of pre-trained models and open evaluation datasets factor into assessing the performance of binary semantic similarity classification tasks. As (1) end-user-facing documentation around the curation of these datasets and pre-trained model training regimes is often not easily accessible and (2) given the lower friction and higher demand to quickly deploy such systems in real-world contexts, our study reinforces prior work showing performance disparities across datasets, embedding techniques and distance metrics, while highlighting the importance of understanding how data is collected, curated and analyzed in semantic similarity classification.

We present the Legal Passage Retrieval Dataset LePaRD. LePaRD is a massive collection of U.S. federal judicial citations to precedent in context. The dataset aims to facilitate work on legal passage prediction, a challenging practice-oriented legal retrieval and reasoning task. Legal passage prediction seeks to predict relevant passages from precedential court decisions given the context of a legal argument. We extensively evaluate various retrieval approaches on LePaRD, and find that classification appears to work best. However, we note that legal precedent prediction is a difficult task, and there remains significant room for improvement. We hope that by publishing LePaRD, we will encourage others to engage with a legal NLP task that promises to help expand access to justice by reducing the burden associated with legal research. A subset of the LePaRD dataset is freely available and the whole dataset will be released upon publication.

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%.

We introduce a novel class of sample-based explanations we term high-dimensional representers, that can be used to explain the predictions of a regularized high-dimensional model in terms of importance weights for each of the training samples. Our workhorse is a novel representer theorem for general regularized high-dimensional models, which decomposes the model prediction in terms of contributions from each of the training samples: with positive (negative) values corresponding to positive (negative) impact training samples to the model's prediction. We derive consequences for the canonical instances of ell_1 regularized sparse models, and nuclear norm regularized low-rank models. As a case study, we further investigate the application of low-rank models in the context of collaborative filtering, where we instantiate high-dimensional representers for specific popular classes of models. Finally, we study the empirical performance of our proposed methods on three real-world binary classification datasets and two recommender system datasets. We also showcase the utility of high-dimensional representers in explaining model recommendations.

The existing search tools for exploring the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) can be quite rich and empowering (e.g., similar and trending operators), but researchers are not yet allowed to fully leverage semantic search. For example, a query for "results from the Planck mission" should be able to distinguish between all the various meanings of Planck (person, mission, constant, institutions and more) without further clarification from the user. At ADS, we are applying modern machine learning and natural language processing techniques to our dataset of recent astronomy publications to train astroBERT, a deeply contextual language model based on research at Google. Using astroBERT, we aim to enrich the ADS dataset and improve its discoverability, and in particular we are developing our own named entity recognition tool. We present here our preliminary results and lessons learned.

We introduce a Parametric Information Maximization (PIM) model for the Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) problem. Specifically, we propose a bi-level optimization formulation, which explores a parameterized family of objective functions, each evaluating a weighted mutual information between the features and the latent labels, subject to supervision constraints from the labeled samples. Our formulation mitigates the class-balance bias encoded in standard information maximization approaches, thereby handling effectively both short-tailed and long-tailed data sets. We report extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrating that our PIM model consistently sets new state-of-the-art performances in GCD across six different datasets, more so when dealing with challenging fine-grained problems.

We consider automatically identifying the defined term within a mathematical definition from the text of an academic article. Inspired by the development of transformer-based natural language processing applications, we pose the problem as (a) a token-level classification task using fine-tuned pre-trained transformers; and (b) a question-answering task using a generalist large language model (GPT). We also propose a rule-based approach to build a labeled dataset from the LATEX source of papers. Experimental results show that it is possible to reach high levels of precision and recall using either recent (and expensive) GPT 4 or simpler pre-trained models fine-tuned on our task.

Open vocabulary models (e.g. CLIP) have shown strong performance on zero-shot classification through their ability generate embeddings for each class based on their (natural language) names. Prior work has focused on improving the accuracy of these models through prompt engineering or by incorporating a small amount of labeled downstream data (via finetuning). However, there has been little focus on improving the richness of the class names themselves, which can pose issues when class labels are coarsely-defined and are uninformative. We propose Classification with Hierarchical Label Sets (or CHiLS), an alternative strategy for zero-shot classification specifically designed for datasets with implicit semantic hierarchies. CHiLS proceeds in three steps: (i) for each class, produce a set of subclasses, using either existing label hierarchies or by querying GPT-3; (ii) perform the standard zero-shot CLIP procedure as though these subclasses were the labels of interest; (iii) map the predicted subclass back to its parent to produce the final prediction. Across numerous datasets with underlying hierarchical structure, CHiLS leads to improved accuracy in situations both with and without ground-truth hierarchical information. CHiLS is simple to implement within existing zero-shot pipelines and requires no additional training cost. Code is available at: https://github.com/acmi-lab/CHILS.

We propose a method that can generate an unambiguous description (known as a referring expression) of a specific object or region in an image, and which can also comprehend or interpret such an expression to infer which object is being described. We show that our method outperforms previous methods that generate descriptions of objects without taking into account other potentially ambiguous objects in the scene. Our model is inspired by recent successes of deep learning methods for image captioning, but while image captioning is difficult to evaluate, our task allows for easy objective evaluation. We also present a new large-scale dataset for referring expressions, based on MS-COCO. We have released the dataset and a toolbox for visualization and evaluation, see https://github.com/mjhucla/Google_Refexp_toolbox

Existing research on malware classification focuses almost exclusively on two tasks: distinguishing between malicious and benign files and classifying malware by family. However, malware can be categorized according to many other types of attributes, and the ability to identify these attributes in newly-emerging malware using machine learning could provide significant value to analysts. In particular, we have identified four tasks which are under-represented in prior work: classification by behaviors that malware exhibit, platforms that malware run on, vulnerabilities that malware exploit, and packers that malware are packed with. To obtain labels for training and evaluating ML classifiers on these tasks, we created an antivirus (AV) tagging tool called ClarAVy. ClarAVy's sophisticated AV label parser distinguishes itself from prior AV-based taggers, with the ability to accurately parse 882 different AV label formats used by 90 different AV products. We are releasing benchmark datasets for each of these four classification tasks, tagged using ClarAVy and comprising nearly 5.5 million malicious files in total. Our malware behavior dataset includes 75 distinct tags - nearly 7x more than the only prior benchmark dataset with behavioral tags. To our knowledge, we are the first to release datasets with malware platform and packer tags.

Text classification is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP), and large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their capability to perform this task across various domains. However, the performance of LLMs heavily depends on the quality of their input prompts. Recent studies have also shown that LLMs exhibit remarkable results in code-related tasks. To leverage the capabilities of LLMs in text classification, we propose the Code Completion Prompt (CoCoP) method, which transforms the text classification problem into a code completion task. CoCoP significantly improves text classification performance across diverse datasets by utilizing LLMs' code-completion capability. For instance, CoCoP enhances the accuracy of the SST2 dataset by more than 20%. Moreover, when CoCoP integrated with LLMs specifically designed for code-related tasks (code models), such as CodeLLaMA, this method demonstrates better or comparable performance to few-shot learning techniques while using only one-tenth of the model size. The source code of our proposed method will be available to the public upon the acceptance of the paper.

The work of this paper presents a dataset that contains the data of 4011 videos about the ongoing outbreak of measles published on 264 websites on the internet between January 1, 2024, and May 31, 2024. The dataset is available at https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/40s8-xf63. These websites primarily include YouTube and TikTok, which account for 48.6% and 15.2% of the videos, respectively. The remainder of the websites include Instagram and Facebook as well as the websites of various global and local news organizations. For each of these videos, the URL of the video, title of the post, description of the post, and the date of publication of the video are presented as separate attributes in the dataset. After developing this dataset, sentiment analysis (using VADER), subjectivity analysis (using TextBlob), and fine-grain sentiment analysis (using DistilRoBERTa-base) of the video titles and video descriptions were performed. This included classifying each video title and video description into (i) one of the sentiment classes i.e. positive, negative, or neutral, (ii) one of the subjectivity classes i.e. highly opinionated, neutral opinionated, or least opinionated, and (iii) one of the fine-grain sentiment classes i.e. fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, or neutral. These results are presented as separate attributes in the dataset for the training and testing of machine learning algorithms for performing sentiment analysis or subjectivity analysis in this field as well as for other applications. Finally, this paper also presents a list of open research questions that may be investigated using this dataset.

Astronomers have typically set out to solve supervised machine learning problems by creating their own representations from scratch. We show that deep learning models trained to answer every Galaxy Zoo DECaLS question learn meaningful semantic representations of galaxies that are useful for new tasks on which the models were never trained. We exploit these representations to outperform several recent approaches at practical tasks crucial for investigating large galaxy samples. The first task is identifying galaxies of similar morphology to a query galaxy. Given a single galaxy assigned a free text tag by humans (e.g. "#diffuse"), we can find galaxies matching that tag for most tags. The second task is identifying the most interesting anomalies to a particular researcher. Our approach is 100% accurate at identifying the most interesting 100 anomalies (as judged by Galaxy Zoo 2 volunteers). The third task is adapting a model to solve a new task using only a small number of newly-labelled galaxies. Models fine-tuned from our representation are better able to identify ring galaxies than models fine-tuned from terrestrial images (ImageNet) or trained from scratch. We solve each task with very few new labels; either one (for the similarity search) or several hundred (for anomaly detection or fine-tuning). This challenges the longstanding view that deep supervised methods require new large labelled datasets for practical use in astronomy. To help the community benefit from our pretrained models, we release our fine-tuning code Zoobot. Zoobot is accessible to researchers with no prior experience in deep learning.

Image descriptions can help visually impaired people to quickly understand the image content. While we made significant progress in automatically describing images and optical character recognition, current approaches are unable to include written text in their descriptions, although text is omnipresent in human environments and frequently critical to understand our surroundings. To study how to comprehend text in the context of an image we collect a novel dataset, TextCaps, with 145k captions for 28k images. Our dataset challenges a model to recognize text, relate it to its visual context, and decide what part of the text to copy or paraphrase, requiring spatial, semantic, and visual reasoning between multiple text tokens and visual entities, such as objects. We study baselines and adapt existing approaches to this new task, which we refer to as image captioning with reading comprehension. Our analysis with automatic and human studies shows that our new TextCaps dataset provides many new technical challenges over previous datasets.

Annotation and classification of legal text are central components of empirical legal research. Traditionally, these tasks are often delegated to trained research assistants. Motivated by the advances in language modeling, empirical legal scholars are increasingly turning to prompting commercial models, hoping that it will alleviate the significant cost of human annotation. Despite growing use, our understanding of how to best utilize large language models for legal tasks remains limited. We conduct a comprehensive study of 260 legal text classification tasks, nearly all new to the machine learning community. Starting from GPT-4 as a baseline, we show that it has non-trivial but highly varied zero-shot accuracy, often exhibiting performance that may be insufficient for legal work. We then demonstrate that a lightly fine-tuned Llama 3 model vastly outperforms GPT-4 on almost all tasks, typically by double-digit percentage points. We find that larger models respond better to fine-tuning than smaller models. A few tens to hundreds of examples suffice to achieve high classification accuracy. Notably, we can fine-tune a single model on all 260 tasks simultaneously at a small loss in accuracy relative to having a separate model for each task. Our work points to a viable alternative to the predominant practice of prompting commercial models. For concrete legal tasks with some available labeled data, researchers are better off using a fine-tuned open-source model.

Understanding Transformer-based models has attracted significant attention, as they lie at the heart of recent technological advances across machine learning. While most interpretability methods rely on running models over inputs, recent work has shown that a zero-pass approach, where parameters are interpreted directly without a forward/backward pass is feasible for some Transformer parameters, and for two-layer attention networks. In this work, we present a theoretical analysis where all parameters of a trained Transformer are interpreted by projecting them into the embedding space, that is, the space of vocabulary items they operate on. We derive a simple theoretical framework to support our arguments and provide ample evidence for its validity. First, an empirical analysis showing that parameters of both pretrained and fine-tuned models can be interpreted in embedding space. Second, we present two applications of our framework: (a) aligning the parameters of different models that share a vocabulary, and (b) constructing a classifier without training by ``translating'' the parameters of a fine-tuned classifier to parameters of a different model that was only pretrained. Overall, our findings open the door to interpretation methods that, at least in part, abstract away from model specifics and operate in the embedding space only.

Job titles form a cornerstone of today's human resources (HR) processes. Within online recruitment, they allow candidates to understand the contents of a vacancy at a glance, while internal HR departments use them to organize and structure many of their processes. As job titles are a compact, convenient, and readily available data source, modeling them with high accuracy can greatly benefit many HR tech applications. In this paper, we propose a neural representation model for job titles, by augmenting a pre-trained language model with co-occurrence information from skill labels extracted from vacancies. Our JobBERT method leads to considerable improvements compared to using generic sentence encoders, for the task of job title normalization, for which we release a new evaluation benchmark.

We present a new challenging dataset, CPPE - 5 (Medical Personal Protective Equipment), with the goal to allow the study of subordinate categorization of medical personal protective equipments, which is not possible with other popular data sets that focus on broad-level categories (such as PASCAL VOC, ImageNet, Microsoft COCO, OpenImages, etc). To make it easy for models trained on this dataset to be used in practical scenarios in complex scenes, our dataset mainly contains images that show complex scenes with several objects in each scene in their natural context. The image collection for this dataset focuses on: obtaining as many non-iconic images as possible and making sure all the images are real-life images, unlike other existing datasets in this area. Our dataset includes 5 object categories (coveralls, face shields, gloves, masks, and goggles), and each image is annotated with a set of bounding boxes and positive labels. We present a detailed analysis of the dataset in comparison to other popular broad category datasets as well as datasets focusing on personal protective equipments, we also find that at present there exist no such publicly available datasets. Finally, we also analyze performance and compare model complexities on baseline and state-of-the-art models for bounding box results. Our code, data, and trained models are available at https://git.io/cppe5-dataset.

Learning high-quality feature embeddings efficiently and effectively is critical for the performance of web-scale machine learning systems. A typical model ingests hundreds of features with vocabularies on the order of millions to billions of tokens. The standard approach is to represent each feature value as a d-dimensional embedding, introducing hundreds of billions of parameters for extremely high-cardinality features. This bottleneck has led to substantial progress in alternative embedding algorithms. Many of these methods, however, make the assumption that each feature uses an independent embedding table. This work introduces a simple yet highly effective framework, Feature Multiplexing, where one single representation space is used across many different categorical features. Our theoretical and empirical analysis reveals that multiplexed embeddings can be decomposed into components from each constituent feature, allowing models to distinguish between features. We show that multiplexed representations lead to Pareto-optimal parameter-accuracy tradeoffs for three public benchmark datasets. Further, we propose a highly practical approach called Unified Embedding with three major benefits: simplified feature configuration, strong adaptation to dynamic data distributions, and compatibility with modern hardware. Unified embedding gives significant improvements in offline and online metrics compared to highly competitive baselines across five web-scale search, ads, and recommender systems, where it serves billions of users across the world in industry-leading products.

In this paper, we consider a novel research problem: music-to-text synaesthesia. Different from the classical music tagging problem that classifies a music recording into pre-defined categories, music-to-text synaesthesia aims to generate descriptive texts from music recordings with the same sentiment for further understanding. As existing music-related datasets do not contain the semantic descriptions on music recordings, we collect a new dataset that contains 1,955 aligned pairs of classical music recordings and text descriptions. Based on this, we build a computational model to generate sentences that can describe the content of the music recording. To tackle the highly non-discriminative classical music, we design a group topology-preservation loss, which considers more samples as a group reference and preserves the relative topology among different samples. Extensive experimental results qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model over five heuristics or pre-trained competitive methods and their variants on our collected dataset.

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to discover novel categories in unlabelled datasets using knowledge learned from labelled samples. Previous studies argued that parametric classifiers are prone to overfitting to seen categories, and endorsed using a non-parametric classifier formed with semi-supervised k-means. However, in this study, we investigate the failure of parametric classifiers, verify the effectiveness of previous design choices when high-quality supervision is available, and identify unreliable pseudo-labels as a key problem. We demonstrate that two prediction biases exist: the classifier tends to predict seen classes more often, and produces an imbalanced distribution across seen and novel categories. Based on these findings, we propose a simple yet effective parametric classification method that benefits from entropy regularisation, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple GCD benchmarks and shows strong robustness to unknown class numbers. We hope the investigation and proposed simple framework can serve as a strong baseline to facilitate future studies in this field. Our code is available at: https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/SimGCD.

In recent years, there is strong emphasis on mining medical data using machine learning techniques. A common problem is to obtain a noiseless set of textual documents, with a relevant content for the research question, and developing a Question Answering (QA) model for a specific medical field. The purpose of this paper is to present a new methodology for building a medical dataset and obtain a QA model for analysis of symptoms and impact on daily life for a specific disease domain. The ``Mental Health'' forum was used, a forum dedicated to people suffering from schizophrenia and different mental disorders. Relevant posts of active users, who regularly participate, were extrapolated providing a new method of obtaining low-bias content and without privacy issues. Furthermore, it is shown how to pre-process the dataset to convert it into a QA dataset. The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), DistilBERT, RoBERTa, and BioBERT models were fine-tuned and evaluated via F1-Score, Exact Match, Precision and Recall. Accurate empirical experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method for obtaining an accurate dataset for QA model implementation. By fine-tuning the BioBERT QA model, we achieved an F1 score of 0.885, showing a considerable improvement and outperforming the state-of-the-art model for mental disorders domain.

BEIR is a benchmark dataset for zero-shot evaluation of information retrieval models across 18 different domain/task combinations. In recent years, we have witnessed the growing popularity of a representation learning approach to building retrieval models, typically using pretrained transformers in a supervised setting. This naturally begs the question: How effective are these models when presented with queries and documents that differ from the training data? Examples include searching in different domains (e.g., medical or legal text) and with different types of queries (e.g., keywords vs. well-formed questions). While BEIR was designed to answer these questions, our work addresses two shortcomings that prevent the benchmark from achieving its full potential: First, the sophistication of modern neural methods and the complexity of current software infrastructure create barriers to entry for newcomers. To this end, we provide reproducible reference implementations that cover the two main classes of approaches: learned dense and sparse models. Second, there does not exist a single authoritative nexus for reporting the effectiveness of different models on BEIR, which has led to difficulty in comparing different methods. To remedy this, we present an official self-service BEIR leaderboard that provides fair and consistent comparisons of retrieval models. By addressing both shortcomings, our work facilitates future explorations in a range of interesting research questions that BEIR enables.

The ability of large language models to generate complex texts allows them to be widely integrated into many aspects of life, and their output can quickly fill all network resources. As the impact of LLMs grows, it becomes increasingly important to develop powerful detectors for the generated text. This detector is essential to prevent the potential misuse of these technologies and to protect areas such as social media from the negative effects of false content generated by LLMS. The main goal of LLM-generated text detection is to determine whether text is generated by an LLM, which is a basic binary classification task. In our work, we mainly use three different classification methods based on open source datasets: traditional machine learning techniques such as logistic regression, k-means clustering, Gaussian Naive Bayes, support vector machines, and methods based on converters such as BERT, and finally algorithms that use LLMs to detect LLM-generated text. We focus on model generalization, potential adversarial attacks, and accuracy of model evaluation. Finally, the possible research direction in the future is proposed, and the current experimental results are summarized.

This work presents the BanglishRev Dataset, the largest e-commerce product review dataset to date for reviews written in Bengali, English, a mixture of both and Banglish, Bengali words written with English alphabets. The dataset comprises of 1.74 million written reviews from 3.2 million ratings information collected from a total of 128k products being sold in online e-commerce platforms targeting the Bengali population. It includes an extensive array of related metadata for each of the reviews including the rating given by the reviewer, date the review was posted and date of purchase, number of likes, dislikes, response from the seller, images associated with the review etc. With sentiment analysis being the most prominent usage of review datasets, experimentation with a binary sentiment analysis model with the review rating serving as an indicator of positive or negative sentiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the large amount of data presented in BanglishRev for sentiment analysis tasks. A BanglishBERT model is trained on the data from BanglishRev with reviews being considered labeled positive if the rating is greater than 3 and negative if the rating is less than or equal to 3. The model is evaluated by being testing against a previously published manually annotated dataset for e-commerce reviews written in a mixture of Bangla, English and Banglish. The experimental model achieved an exceptional accuracy of 94\% and F1 score of 0.94, demonstrating the dataset's efficacy for sentiment analysis. Some of the intriguing patterns and observations seen within the dataset and future research directions where the dataset can be utilized is also discussed and explored. The dataset can be accessed through https://huggingface.co/datasets/BanglishRev/bangla-english-and-code-mixed-ecommerce-review-dataset.

Clinical notes contain information about patients that goes beyond structured data like lab values and medications. However, clinical notes have been underused relative to structured data, because notes are high-dimensional and sparse. This work develops and evaluates representations of clinical notes using bidirectional transformers (ClinicalBERT). ClinicalBERT uncovers high-quality relationships between medical concepts as judged by humans. ClinicalBert outperforms baselines on 30-day hospital readmission prediction using both discharge summaries and the first few days of notes in the intensive care unit. Code and model parameters are available.

Linking clinical narratives to standardized vocabularies and coding systems is a key component of unlocking the information in medical text for analysis. However, many domains of medical concepts lack well-developed terminologies that can support effective coding of medical text. We present a framework for developing natural language processing (NLP) technologies for automated coding of under-studied types of medical information, and demonstrate its applicability via a case study on physical mobility function. Mobility is a component of many health measures, from post-acute care and surgical outcomes to chronic frailty and disability, and is coded in the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF). However, mobility and other types of functional activity remain under-studied in medical informatics, and neither the ICF nor commonly-used medical terminologies capture functional status terminology in practice. We investigated two data-driven paradigms, classification and candidate selection, to link narrative observations of mobility to standardized ICF codes, using a dataset of clinical narratives from physical therapy encounters. Recent advances in language modeling and word embedding were used as features for established machine learning models and a novel deep learning approach, achieving a macro F-1 score of 84% on linking mobility activity reports to ICF codes. Both classification and candidate selection approaches present distinct strengths for automated coding in under-studied domains, and we highlight that the combination of (i) a small annotated data set; (ii) expert definitions of codes of interest; and (iii) a representative text corpus is sufficient to produce high-performing automated coding systems. This study has implications for the ongoing growth of NLP tools for a variety of specialized applications in clinical care and research.

Peer review in grant evaluation informs funding decisions, but the contents of peer review reports are rarely analyzed. In this work, we develop a thoroughly tested pipeline to analyze the texts of grant peer review reports using methods from applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning. We start by developing twelve categories reflecting content of grant peer review reports that are of interest to research funders. This is followed by multiple human annotators' iterative annotation of these categories in a novel text corpus of grant peer review reports submitted to the Swiss National Science Foundation. After validating the human annotation, we use the annotated texts to fine-tune pre-trained transformer models to classify these categories at scale, while conducting several robustness and validation checks. Our results show that many categories can be reliably identified by human annotators and machine learning approaches. However, the choice of text classification approach considerably influences the classification performance. We also find a high correspondence between out-of-sample classification performance and human annotators' perceived difficulty in identifying categories. Our results and publicly available fine-tuned transformer models will allow researchers and research funders and anybody interested in peer review to examine and report on the contents of these reports in a structured manner. Ultimately, we hope our approach can contribute to ensuring the quality and trustworthiness of grant peer review.

Trained on the large corpus, pre-trained language models (PLMs) can capture different levels of concepts in context and hence generate universal language representations. They can benefit multiple downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Although PTMs have been widely used in most NLP applications, especially for high-resource languages such as English, it is under-represented in Lao NLP research. Previous work on Lao has been hampered by the lack of annotated datasets and the sparsity of language resources. In this work, we construct a text classification dataset to alleviate the resource-scare situation of the Lao language. We additionally present the first transformer-based PTMs for Lao with four versions: BERT-small, BERT-base, ELECTRA-small and ELECTRA-base, and evaluate it over two downstream tasks: part-of-speech tagging and text classification. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our Lao models. We will release our models and datasets to the community, hoping to facilitate the future development of Lao NLP applications.

Abstractive summarization models are commonly trained using maximum likelihood estimation, which assumes a deterministic (one-point) target distribution in which an ideal model will assign all the probability mass to the reference summary. This assumption may lead to performance degradation during inference, where the model needs to compare several system-generated (candidate) summaries that have deviated from the reference summary. To address this problem, we propose a novel training paradigm which assumes a non-deterministic distribution so that different candidate summaries are assigned probability mass according to their quality. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art result on the CNN/DailyMail (47.78 ROUGE-1) and XSum (49.07 ROUGE-1) datasets. Further analysis also shows that our model can estimate probabilities of candidate summaries that are more correlated with their level of quality.

As machine learning systems become ubiquitous, there has been a surge of interest in interpretable machine learning: systems that provide explanation for their outputs. These explanations are often used to qualitatively assess other criteria such as safety or non-discrimination. However, despite the interest in interpretability, there is very little consensus on what interpretable machine learning is and how it should be measured. In this position paper, we first define interpretability and describe when interpretability is needed (and when it is not). Next, we suggest a taxonomy for rigorous evaluation and expose open questions towards a more rigorous science of interpretable machine learning.

Teachers and students are increasingly relying on online learning resources to supplement the ones provided in school. This increase in the breadth and depth of available resources is a great thing for students, but only provided they are able to find answers to their queries. Question-answering and information retrieval systems have benefited from public datasets to train and evaluate their algorithms, but most of these datasets have been in English text written by and for adults. We introduce a new public French question-answering dataset collected from Alloprof, a Quebec-based primary and high-school help website, containing 29 349 questions and their explanations in a variety of school subjects from 10 368 students, with more than half of the explanations containing links to other questions or some of the 2 596 reference pages on the website. We also present a case study of this dataset in an information retrieval task. This dataset was collected on the Alloprof public forum, with all questions verified for their appropriateness and the explanations verified both for their appropriateness and their relevance to the question. To predict relevant documents, architectures using pre-trained BERT models were fine-tuned and evaluated. This dataset will allow researchers to develop question-answering, information retrieval and other algorithms specifically for the French speaking education context. Furthermore, the range of language proficiency, images, mathematical symbols and spelling mistakes will necessitate algorithms based on a multimodal comprehension. The case study we present as a baseline shows an approach that relies on recent techniques provides an acceptable performance level, but more work is necessary before it can reliably be used and trusted in a production setting.

Recently pre-trained language representation models such as BERT have shown great success when fine-tuned on downstream tasks including information retrieval (IR). However, pre-training objectives tailored for ad-hoc retrieval have not been well explored. In this paper, we propose Pre-training with Representative wOrds Prediction (PROP) for ad-hoc retrieval. PROP is inspired by the classical statistical language model for IR, specifically the query likelihood model, which assumes that the query is generated as the piece of text representative of the "ideal" document. Based on this idea, we construct the representative words prediction (ROP) task for pre-training. Given an input document, we sample a pair of word sets according to the document language model, where the set with higher likelihood is deemed as more representative of the document. We then pre-train the Transformer model to predict the pairwise preference between the two word sets, jointly with the Masked Language Model (MLM) objective. By further fine-tuning on a variety of representative downstream ad-hoc retrieval tasks, PROP achieves significant improvements over baselines without pre-training or with other pre-training methods. We also show that PROP can achieve exciting performance under both the zero- and low-resource IR settings. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Albert-Ma/PROP.

Over the past two decades machine learning has permeated almost every realm of technology. At the same time, many researchers have begun using category theory as a unifying language, facilitating communication between different scientific disciplines. It is therefore unsurprising that there is a burgeoning interest in applying category theory to machine learning. We aim to document the motivations, goals and common themes across these applications. We touch on gradient-based learning, probability, and equivariant learning.

Modern machine learning relies on datasets to develop and validate research ideas. Given the growth of publicly available data, finding the right dataset to use is increasingly difficult. Any research question imposes explicit and implicit constraints on how well a given dataset will enable researchers to answer this question, such as dataset size, modality, and domain. We operationalize the task of recommending datasets given a short natural language description of a research idea, to help people find relevant datasets for their needs. Dataset recommendation poses unique challenges as an information retrieval problem; datasets are hard to directly index for search and there are no corpora readily available for this task. To facilitate this task, we build the DataFinder Dataset which consists of a larger automatically-constructed training set (17.5K queries) and a smaller expert-annotated evaluation set (392 queries). Using this data, we compare various information retrieval algorithms on our test set and present a superior bi-encoder retriever for text-based dataset recommendation. This system, trained on the DataFinder Dataset, finds more relevant search results than existing third-party dataset search engines. To encourage progress on dataset recommendation, we release our dataset and models to the public.

Summarization models often generate text that is poorly calibrated to quality metrics because they are trained to maximize the likelihood of a single reference (MLE). To address this, recent work has added a calibration step, which exposes a model to its own ranked outputs to improve relevance or, in a separate line of work, contrasts positive and negative sets to improve faithfulness. While effective, much of this work has focused on how to generate and optimize these sets. Less is known about why one setup is more effective than another. In this work, we uncover the underlying characteristics of effective sets. For each training instance, we form a large, diverse pool of candidates and systematically vary the subsets used for calibration fine-tuning. Each selection strategy targets distinct aspects of the sets, such as lexical diversity or the size of the gap between positive and negatives. On three diverse scientific long-form summarization datasets (spanning biomedical, clinical, and chemical domains), we find, among others, that faithfulness calibration is optimal when the negative sets are extractive and more likely to be generated, whereas for relevance calibration, the metric margin between candidates should be maximized and surprise--the disagreement between model and metric defined candidate rankings--minimized. Code to create, select, and optimize calibration sets is available at https://github.com/griff4692/calibrating-summaries

Learning compatible representations enables the interchangeable use of semantic features as models are updated over time. This is particularly relevant in search and retrieval systems where it is crucial to avoid reprocessing of the gallery images with the updated model. While recent research has shown promising empirical evidence, there is still a lack of comprehensive theoretical understanding about learning compatible representations. In this paper, we demonstrate that the stationary representations learned by the d-Simplex fixed classifier optimally approximate compatibility representation according to the two inequality constraints of its formal definition. This not only establishes a solid foundation for future works in this line of research but also presents implications that can be exploited in practical learning scenarios. An exemplary application is the now-standard practice of downloading and fine-tuning new pre-trained models. Specifically, we show the strengths and critical issues of stationary representations in the case in which a model undergoing sequential fine-tuning is asynchronously replaced by downloading a better-performing model pre-trained elsewhere. Such a representation enables seamless delivery of retrieval service (i.e., no reprocessing of gallery images) and offers improved performance without operational disruptions during model replacement. Code available at: https://github.com/miccunifi/iamcl2r.

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.

The "Information Retrieval in Software Engineering (IRSE)" at FIRE 2023 shared task introduces code comment classification, a challenging task that pairs a code snippet with a comment that should be evaluated as either useful or not useful to the understanding of the relevant code. We answer the code comment classification shared task challenge by providing a two-fold evaluation: from an algorithmic perspective, we compare the performance of classical machine learning systems and complement our evaluations from a data-driven perspective by generating additional data with the help of large language model (LLM) prompting to measure the potential increase in performance. Our best model, which took second place in the shared task, is a Neural Network with a Macro-F1 score of 88.401% on the provided seed data and a 1.5% overall increase in performance on the data generated by the LLM.

Automatically understanding the rhetorical roles of sentences in a legal case judgement is an important problem to solve, since it can help in several downstream tasks like summarization of legal judgments, legal search, and so on. The task is challenging since legal case documents are usually not well-structured, and these rhetorical roles may be subjective (as evident from variation of opinions between legal experts). In this paper, we address this task for judgments from the Supreme Court of India. We label sentences in 50 documents using multiple human annotators, and perform an extensive analysis of the human-assigned labels. We also attempt automatic identification of the rhetorical roles of sentences. While prior approaches towards this task used Conditional Random Fields over manually handcrafted features, we explore the use of deep neural models which do not require hand-crafting of features. Experiments show that neural models perform much better in this task than baseline methods which use handcrafted features.

The ever-increasing number of materials science articles makes it hard to infer chemistry-structure-property relations from published literature. We used natural language processing (NLP) methods to automatically extract material property data from the abstracts of polymer literature. As a component of our pipeline, we trained MaterialsBERT, a language model, using 2.4 million materials science abstracts, which outperforms other baseline models in three out of five named entity recognition datasets when used as the encoder for text. Using this pipeline, we obtained ~300,000 material property records from ~130,000 abstracts in 60 hours. The extracted data was analyzed for a diverse range of applications such as fuel cells, supercapacitors, and polymer solar cells to recover non-trivial insights. The data extracted through our pipeline is made available through a web platform at https://polymerscholar.org which can be used to locate material property data recorded in abstracts conveniently. This work demonstrates the feasibility of an automatic pipeline that starts from published literature and ends with a complete set of extracted material property information.

Machine learning plays an ever-bigger part in online recruitment, powering intelligent matchmaking and job recommendations across many of the world's largest job platforms. However, the main text is rarely enough to fully understand a job posting: more often than not, much of the required information is condensed into the job title. Several organised efforts have been made to map job titles onto a hand-made knowledge base as to provide this information, but these only cover around 60\% of online vacancies. We introduce a novel, purely data-driven approach towards the detection of new job titles. Our method is conceptually simple, extremely efficient and competitive with traditional NER-based approaches. Although the standalone application of our method does not outperform a finetuned BERT model, it can be applied as a preprocessing step as well, substantially boosting accuracy across several architectures.

Despite significant advancements in multi-label text classification, the ability of existing models to generalize to novel and seldom-encountered complex concepts, which are compositions of elementary ones, remains underexplored. This research addresses this gap. By creating unique data splits across three benchmarks, we assess the compositional generalization ability of existing multi-label text classification models. Our results show that these models often fail to generalize to compositional concepts encountered infrequently during training, leading to inferior performance on tests with these new combinations. To address this, we introduce a data augmentation method that leverages two innovative text generation models designed to enhance the classification models' capacity for compositional generalization. Our experiments show that this data augmentation approach significantly improves the compositional generalization capabilities of classification models on our benchmarks, with both generation models surpassing other text generation baselines.

We identify rare and visually distinctive galaxy populations by searching for structure within the learned representations of pretrained models. We show that these representations arrange galaxies by appearance in patterns beyond those needed to predict the pretraining labels. We design a clustering approach to isolate specific local patterns, revealing groups of galaxies with rare and scientifically-interesting morphologies.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability to generate fluent responses to a wide variety of user queries, but this has also resulted in concerns regarding the potential misuse of such texts in journalism, educational, and academic context. In this work, we aim to develop automatic systems to identify machine-generated text and to detect potential misuse. We first introduce a large-scale benchmark M4, which is multi-generator, multi-domain, and multi-lingual corpus for machine-generated text detection. Using the dataset, we experiment with a number of methods and we show that it is challenging for detectors to generalize well on unseen examples if they are either from different domains or are generated by different large language models. In such cases, detectors tend to misclassify machine-generated text as human-written. These results show that the problem is far from solved and there is a lot of room for improvement. We believe that our dataset M4, which covers different generators, domains and languages, will enable future research towards more robust approaches for this pressing societal problem. The M4 dataset is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/M4.

Modern machine learning research relies on relatively few carefully curated datasets. Even in these datasets, and typically in `untidy' or raw data, practitioners are faced with significant issues of data quality and diversity which can be prohibitively labor intensive to address. Existing methods for dealing with these challenges tend to make strong assumptions about the particular issues at play, and often require a priori knowledge or metadata such as domain labels. Our work is orthogonal to these methods: we instead focus on providing a unified and efficient framework for Metadata Archaeology -- uncovering and inferring metadata of examples in a dataset. We curate different subsets of data that might exist in a dataset (e.g. mislabeled, atypical, or out-of-distribution examples) using simple transformations, and leverage differences in learning dynamics between these probe suites to infer metadata of interest. Our method is on par with far more sophisticated mitigation methods across different tasks: identifying and correcting mislabeled examples, classifying minority-group samples, prioritizing points relevant for training and enabling scalable human auditing of relevant examples.

This work introduces BioLORD, a new pre-training strategy for producing meaningful representations for clinical sentences and biomedical concepts. State-of-the-art methodologies operate by maximizing the similarity in representation of names referring to the same concept, and preventing collapse through contrastive learning. However, because biomedical names are not always self-explanatory, it sometimes results in non-semantic representations. BioLORD overcomes this issue by grounding its concept representations using definitions, as well as short descriptions derived from a multi-relational knowledge graph consisting of biomedical ontologies. Thanks to this grounding, our model produces more semantic concept representations that match more closely the hierarchical structure of ontologies. BioLORD establishes a new state of the art for text similarity on both clinical sentences (MedSTS) and biomedical concepts (MayoSRS).

This paper presents RISC, an open-source Python package data generator (https://github.com/GRAAL-Research/risc). RISC generates look-alike automobile insurance contracts based on the Quebec regulatory insurance form in French and English. Insurance contracts are 90 to 100 pages long and use complex legal and insurance-specific vocabulary for a layperson. Hence, they are a much more complex class of documents than those in traditional NLP corpora. Therefore, we introduce RISCBAC, a Realistic Insurance Synthetic Bilingual Automobile Contract dataset based on the mandatory Quebec car insurance contract. The dataset comprises 10,000 French and English unannotated insurance contracts. RISCBAC enables NLP research for unsupervised automatic summarisation, question answering, text simplification, machine translation and more. Moreover, it can be further automatically annotated as a dataset for supervised tasks such as NER

This paper uses the BERT model, which is a transformer-based architecture, to solve task 4A, English Language, Sentiment Analysis in Twitter of SemEval2017. BERT is a very powerful large language model for classification tasks when the amount of training data is small. For this experiment, we have used the BERT(BASE) model, which has 12 hidden layers. This model provides better accuracy, precision, recall, and f1 score than the Naive Bayes baseline model. It performs better in binary classification subtasks than the multi-class classification subtasks. We also considered all kinds of ethical issues during this experiment, as Twitter data contains personal and sensible information. The dataset and code used in our experiment can be found in this GitHub repository.

This paper introduces effective design choices for text-to-music retrieval systems. An ideal text-based retrieval system would support various input queries such as pre-defined tags, unseen tags, and sentence-level descriptions. In reality, most previous works mainly focused on a single query type (tag or sentence) which may not generalize to another input type. Hence, we review recent text-based music retrieval systems using our proposed benchmark in two main aspects: input text representation and training objectives. Our findings enable a universal text-to-music retrieval system that achieves comparable retrieval performances in both tag- and sentence-level inputs. Furthermore, the proposed multimodal representation generalizes to 9 different downstream music classification tasks. We present the code and demo online.

Recently, the emergence of pre-trained models (PTMs) has brought natural language processing (NLP) to a new era. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of PTMs for NLP. We first briefly introduce language representation learning and its research progress. Then we systematically categorize existing PTMs based on a taxonomy with four perspectives. Next, we describe how to adapt the knowledge of PTMs to the downstream tasks. Finally, we outline some potential directions of PTMs for future research. This survey is purposed to be a hands-on guide for understanding, using, and developing PTMs for various NLP tasks.

We consider Large-Scale Multi-Label Text Classification (LMTC) in the legal domain. We release a new dataset of 57k legislative documents from EURLEX, annotated with ~4.3k EUROVOC labels, which is suitable for LMTC, few- and zero-shot learning. Experimenting with several neural classifiers, we show that BIGRUs with label-wise attention perform better than other current state of the art methods. Domain-specific WORD2VEC and context-sensitive ELMO embeddings further improve performance. We also find that considering only particular zones of the documents is sufficient. This allows us to bypass BERT's maximum text length limit and fine-tune BERT, obtaining the best results in all but zero-shot learning cases.

News headline generation is a crucial task in increasing productivity for both the readers and producers of news. This task can easily be aided by automated News headline-generation models. However, the presence of irrelevant headlines in scraped news articles results in sub-optimal performance of generation models. We propose that relevance-based headline classification can greatly aid the task of generating relevant headlines. Relevance-based headline classification involves categorizing news headlines based on their relevance to the corresponding news articles. While this task is well-established in English, it remains under-explored in low-resource languages like Telugu due to a lack of annotated data. To address this gap, we present TeClass, the first-ever human-annotated Telugu news headline classification dataset, containing 78,534 annotations across 26,178 article-headline pairs. We experiment with various baseline models and provide a comprehensive analysis of their results. We further demonstrate the impact of this work by fine-tuning various headline generation models using TeClass dataset. The headlines generated by the models fine-tuned on highly relevant article-headline pairs, showed about a 5 point increment in the ROUGE-L scores. To encourage future research, the annotated dataset as well as the annotation guidelines will be made publicly available.

Neural networks trained on datasets such as ImageNet have led to major advances in visual object classification. One obstacle that prevents networks from reasoning more deeply about complex scenes and situations, and from integrating visual knowledge with natural language, like humans do, is their lack of common sense knowledge about the physical world. Videos, unlike still images, contain a wealth of detailed information about the physical world. However, most labelled video datasets represent high-level concepts rather than detailed physical aspects about actions and scenes. In this work, we describe our ongoing collection of the "something-something" database of video prediction tasks whose solutions require a common sense understanding of the depicted situation. The database currently contains more than 100,000 videos across 174 classes, which are defined as caption-templates. We also describe the challenges in crowd-sourcing this data at scale.

In this paper, we consider the task of retrieving documents with predefined topics from an unlabeled document dataset using an unsupervised approach. The proposed unsupervised approach requires only a small number of keywords describing the respective topics and no labeled document. Existing approaches either heavily relied on a large amount of additionally encoded world knowledge or on term-document frequencies. Contrariwise, we introduce a method that learns jointly embedded document and word vectors solely from the unlabeled document dataset in order to find documents that are semantically similar to the topics described by the keywords. The proposed method requires almost no text preprocessing but is simultaneously effective at retrieving relevant documents with high probability. When successively retrieving documents on different predefined topics from publicly available and commonly used datasets, we achieved an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve value of 0.95 on one dataset and 0.92 on another. Further, our method can be used for multiclass document classification, without the need to assign labels to the dataset in advance. Compared with an unsupervised classification baseline, we increased F1 scores from 76.6 to 82.7 and from 61.0 to 75.1 on the respective datasets. For easy replication of our approach, we make the developed Lbl2Vec code publicly available as a ready-to-use tool under the 3-Clause BSD license.

Multimodal summarization with multimodal output (MSMO) has emerged as a promising research direction. Nonetheless, numerous limitations exist within existing public MSMO datasets, including insufficient upkeep, data inaccessibility, limited size, and the absence of proper categorization, which pose significant challenges to effective research. To address these challenges and provide a comprehensive dataset for this new direction, we have meticulously curated the MultiSum dataset. Our new dataset features (1) Human-validated summaries for both video and textual content, providing superior human instruction and labels for multimodal learning. (2) Comprehensively and meticulously arranged categorization, spanning 17 principal categories and 170 subcategories to encapsulate a diverse array of real-world scenarios. (3) Benchmark tests performed on the proposed dataset to assess varied tasks and methods, including video temporal segmentation, video summarization, text summarization, and multimodal summarization. To champion accessibility and collaboration, we release the MultiSum dataset and the data collection tool as fully open-source resources, fostering transparency and accelerating future developments. Our project website can be found at https://multisum-dataset.github.io/.

Vectors are universal mathematical objects that can represent text, images, speech, or a mix of these data modalities. That happens regardless of whether data is represented by hand-crafted features or learnt embeddings. Collect a large enough quantity of such vectors and the question of retrieval becomes urgently relevant: Finding vectors that are more similar to a query vector. This monograph is concerned with the question above and covers fundamental concepts along with advanced data structures and algorithms for vector retrieval. In doing so, it recaps this fascinating topic and lowers barriers of entry into this rich area of research.

As the smartphone market leader, Android has been a prominent target for malware attacks. The number of malicious applications (apps) identified for it has increased continually over the past decade, creating an immense challenge for all parties involved. For market holders and researchers, in particular, the large number of samples has made manual malware detection unfeasible, leading to an influx of research that investigate Machine Learning (ML) approaches to automate this process. However, while some of the proposed approaches achieve high performance, rapidly evolving Android malware has made them unable to maintain their accuracy over time. This has created a need in the community to conduct further research, and build more flexible ML pipelines. Doing so, however, is currently hindered by a lack of systematic overview of the existing literature, to learn from and improve upon the existing solutions. Existing survey papers often focus only on parts of the ML process (e.g., data collection or model deployment), while omitting other important stages, such as model evaluation and explanation. In this paper, we address this problem with a review of 42 highly-cited papers, spanning a decade of research (from 2011 to 2021). We introduce a novel procedural taxonomy of the published literature, covering how they have used ML algorithms, what features they have engineered, which dimensionality reduction techniques they have employed, what datasets they have employed for training, and what their evaluation and explanation strategies are. Drawing from this taxonomy, we also identify gaps in knowledge and provide ideas for improvement and future work.

In this paper, we consider a real-world scenario where a model that is trained on pre-defined classes continually encounters unlabeled data that contains both known and novel classes. The goal is to continually discover novel classes while maintaining the performance in known classes. We name the setting Continual Generalized Category Discovery (C-GCD). Existing methods for novel class discovery cannot directly handle the C-GCD setting due to some unrealistic assumptions, such as the unlabeled data only containing novel classes. Furthermore, they fail to discover novel classes in a continual fashion. In this work, we lift all these assumptions and propose an approach, called MetaGCD, to learn how to incrementally discover with less forgetting. Our proposed method uses a meta-learning framework and leverages the offline labeled data to simulate the testing incremental learning process. A meta-objective is defined to revolve around two conflicting learning objectives to achieve novel class discovery without forgetting. Furthermore, a soft neighborhood-based contrastive network is proposed to discriminate uncorrelated images while attracting correlated images. We build strong baselines and conduct extensive experiments on three widely used benchmarks to demonstrate the superiority of our method.

We describe a dataset developed for Named Entity Recognition in German federal court decisions. It consists of approx. 67,000 sentences with over 2 million tokens. The resource contains 54,000 manually annotated entities, mapped to 19 fine-grained semantic classes: person, judge, lawyer, country, city, street, landscape, organization, company, institution, court, brand, law, ordinance, European legal norm, regulation, contract, court decision, and legal literature. The legal documents were, furthermore, automatically annotated with more than 35,000 TimeML-based time expressions. The dataset, which is available under a CC-BY 4.0 license in the CoNNL-2002 format, was developed for training an NER service for German legal documents in the EU project Lynx.

This work lists and describes the main recent strategies for building fixed-length, dense and distributed representations for words, based on the distributional hypothesis. These representations are now commonly called word embeddings and, in addition to encoding surprisingly good syntactic and semantic information, have been proven useful as extra features in many downstream NLP tasks.

Analyzing the ever-increasing volume of posts on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter requires improved information processing methods for profiling authorship. Document classification is central to this task, but the performance of traditional supervised classifiers has degraded as the volume of social media has increased. This paper addresses this problem in the context of gender detection through ensemble classification that employs multi-model deep learning architectures to generate specialized understanding from different feature spaces.

The increasing use of tools and solutions based on Large Language Models (LLMs) for various tasks in the medical domain has become a prominent trend. Their use in this highly critical and sensitive domain has thus raised important questions about their robustness, especially in response to variations in input, and the reliability of the generated outputs. This study addresses these questions by constructing a textual dataset based on the ICD-10-CM code descriptions, widely used in US hospitals and containing many clinical terms, and their easily reproducible rephrasing. We then benchmarked existing embedding models, either generalist or specialized in the clinical domain, in a semantic search task where the goal was to correctly match the rephrased text to the original description. Our results showed that generalist models performed better than clinical models, suggesting that existing clinical specialized models are more sensitive to small changes in input that confuse them. The highlighted problem of specialized models may be due to the fact that they have not been trained on sufficient data, and in particular on datasets that are not diverse enough to have a reliable global language understanding, which is still necessary for accurate handling of medical documents.

A database of images of approximately 960 unique plants belonging to 12 species at several growth stages is made publicly available. It comprises annotated RGB images with a physical resolution of roughly 10 pixels per mm. To standardise the evaluation of classification results obtained with the database, a benchmark based on f_{1} scores is proposed. The dataset is available at https://vision.eng.au.dk/plant-seedlings-dataset

In this work, we study the task of classifying legal texts written in the Greek language. We introduce and make publicly available a novel dataset based on Greek legislation, consisting of more than 47 thousand official, categorized Greek legislation resources. We experiment with this dataset and evaluate a battery of advanced methods and classifiers, ranging from traditional machine learning and RNN-based methods to state-of-the-art Transformer-based methods. We show that recurrent architectures with domain-specific word embeddings offer improved overall performance while being competitive even to transformer-based models. Finally, we show that cutting-edge multilingual and monolingual transformer-based models brawl on the top of the classifiers' ranking, making us question the necessity of training monolingual transfer learning models as a rule of thumb. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the task of Greek legal text classification is considered in an open research project, while also Greek is a language with very limited NLP resources in general.

In this paper we introduce a new, high-quality, dataset of images containing fruits. We also present the results of some numerical experiment for training a neural network to detect fruits. We discuss the reason why we chose to use fruits in this project by proposing a few applications that could use this kind of neural network.

We provide a construction for categorical representation learning and introduce the foundations of "categorifier". The central theme in representation learning is the idea of everything to vector. Every object in a dataset S can be represented as a vector in R^n by an encoding map E: Obj(S)toR^n. More importantly, every morphism can be represented as a matrix E: Hom(S)toR^{n}_{n}. The encoding map E is generally modeled by a deep neural network. The goal of representation learning is to design appropriate tasks on the dataset to train the encoding map (assuming that an encoding is optimal if it universally optimizes the performance on various tasks). However, the latter is still a set-theoretic approach. The goal of the current article is to promote the representation learning to a new level via a category-theoretic approach. As a proof of concept, we provide an example of a text translator equipped with our technology, showing that our categorical learning model outperforms the current deep learning models by 17 times. The content of the current article is part of the recent US patent proposal (patent application number: 63110906).

Terms of service of on-line platforms too often contain clauses that are potentially unfair to the consumer. We present an experimental study where machine learning is employed to automatically detect such potentially unfair clauses. Results show that the proposed system could provide a valuable tool for lawyers and consumers alike.

Major scandals in corporate history have urged the need for regulatory compliance, where organizations need to ensure that their controls (processes) comply with relevant laws, regulations, and policies. However, keeping track of the constantly changing legislation is difficult, thus organizations are increasingly adopting Regulatory Technology (RegTech) to facilitate the process. To this end, we introduce regulatory information retrieval (REG-IR), an application of document-to-document information retrieval (DOC2DOC IR), where the query is an entire document making the task more challenging than traditional IR where the queries are short. Furthermore, we compile and release two datasets based on the relationships between EU directives and UK legislation. We experiment on these datasets using a typical two-step pipeline approach comprising a pre-fetcher and a neural re-ranker. Experimenting with various pre-fetchers from BM25 to k nearest neighbors over representations from several BERT models, we show that fine-tuning a BERT model on an in-domain classification task produces the best representations for IR. We also show that neural re-rankers under-perform due to contradicting supervision, i.e., similar query-document pairs with opposite labels. Thus, they are biased towards the pre-fetcher's score. Interestingly, applying a date filter further improves the performance, showcasing the importance of the time dimension.

Enabling machines to understand structured visuals like slides and user interfaces is essential for making them accessible to people with disabilities. However, achieving such understanding computationally has required manual data collection and annotation, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To overcome this challenge, we present a method to generate synthetic, structured visuals with target labels using code generation. Our method allows people to create datasets with built-in labels and train models with a small number of human-annotated examples. We demonstrate performance improvements in three tasks for understanding slides and UIs: recognizing visual elements, describing visual content, and classifying visual content types.

Recent progress in text classification has been focused on high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. For low-resource languages, amongst them most African languages, the lack of well-annotated data and effective preprocessing, is hindering the progress and the transfer of successful methods. In this paper, we introduce two news datasets (KINNEWS and KIRNEWS) for multi-class classification of news articles in Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, two low-resource African languages. The two languages are mutually intelligible, but while Kinyarwanda has been studied in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to some extent, this work constitutes the first study on Kirundi. Along with the datasets, we provide statistics, guidelines for preprocessing, and monolingual and cross-lingual baseline models. Our experiments show that training embeddings on the relatively higher-resourced Kinyarwanda yields successful cross-lingual transfer to Kirundi. In addition, the design of the created datasets allows for a wider use in NLP beyond text classification in future studies, such as representation learning, cross-lingual learning with more distant languages, or as base for new annotations for tasks such as parsing, POS tagging, and NER. The datasets, stopwords, and pre-trained embeddings are publicly available at https://github.com/Andrews2017/KINNEWS-and-KIRNEWS-Corpus .

Multi-modal deep learning techniques for matching free-form text with music have shown promising results in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Prior work is often based on large proprietary data while publicly available datasets are few and small in size. In this study, we present WikiMuTe, a new and open dataset containing rich semantic descriptions of music. The data is sourced from Wikipedia's rich catalogue of articles covering musical works. Using a dedicated text-mining pipeline, we extract both long and short-form descriptions covering a wide range of topics related to music content such as genre, style, mood, instrumentation, and tempo. To show the use of this data, we train a model that jointly learns text and audio representations and performs cross-modal retrieval. The model is evaluated on two tasks: tag-based music retrieval and music auto-tagging. The results show that while our approach has state-of-the-art performance on multiple tasks, but still observe a difference in performance depending on the data used for training.

Recent literature has underscored the importance of dataset documentation work for machine learning, and part of this work involves addressing "documentation debt" for datasets that have been used widely but documented sparsely. This paper aims to help address documentation debt for BookCorpus, a popular text dataset for training large language models. Notably, researchers have used BookCorpus to train OpenAI's GPT-N models and Google's BERT models, even though little to no documentation exists about the dataset's motivation, composition, collection process, etc. We offer a preliminary datasheet that provides key context and information about BookCorpus, highlighting several notable deficiencies. In particular, we find evidence that (1) BookCorpus likely violates copyright restrictions for many books, (2) BookCorpus contains thousands of duplicated books, and (3) BookCorpus exhibits significant skews in genre representation. We also find hints of other potential deficiencies that call for future research, including problematic content, potential skews in religious representation, and lopsided author contributions. While more work remains, this initial effort to provide a datasheet for BookCorpus adds to growing literature that urges more careful and systematic documentation for machine learning datasets.

Labeling neural network submodules with human-legible descriptions is useful for many downstream tasks: such descriptions can surface failures, guide interventions, and perhaps even explain important model behaviors. To date, most mechanistic descriptions of trained networks have involved small models, narrowly delimited phenomena, and large amounts of human labor. Labeling all human-interpretable sub-computations in models of increasing size and complexity will almost certainly require tools that can generate and validate descriptions automatically. Recently, techniques that use learned models in-the-loop for labeling have begun to gain traction, but methods for evaluating their efficacy are limited and ad-hoc. How should we validate and compare open-ended labeling tools? This paper introduces FIND (Function INterpretation and Description), a benchmark suite for evaluating the building blocks of automated interpretability methods. FIND contains functions that resemble components of trained neural networks, and accompanying descriptions of the kind we seek to generate. The functions are procedurally constructed across textual and numeric domains, and involve a range of real-world complexities, including noise, composition, approximation, and bias. We evaluate new and existing methods that use language models (LMs) to produce code-based and language descriptions of function behavior. We find that an off-the-shelf LM augmented with only black-box access to functions can sometimes infer their structure, acting as a scientist by forming hypotheses, proposing experiments, and updating descriptions in light of new data. However, LM-based descriptions tend to capture global function behavior and miss local corruptions. These results show that FIND will be useful for characterizing the performance of more sophisticated interpretability methods before they are applied to real-world models.

The problem of Novel Class Discovery (NCD) consists in extracting knowledge from a labeled set of known classes to accurately partition an unlabeled set of novel classes. While NCD has recently received a lot of attention from the community, it is often solved on computer vision problems and under unrealistic conditions. In particular, the number of novel classes is usually assumed to be known in advance, and their labels are sometimes used to tune hyperparameters. Methods that rely on these assumptions are not applicable in real-world scenarios. In this work, we focus on solving NCD in tabular data when no prior knowledge of the novel classes is available. To this end, we propose to tune the hyperparameters of NCD methods by adapting the k-fold cross-validation process and hiding some of the known classes in each fold. Since we have found that methods with too many hyperparameters are likely to overfit these hidden classes, we define a simple deep NCD model. This method is composed of only the essential elements necessary for the NCD problem and performs impressively well under realistic conditions. Furthermore, we find that the latent space of this method can be used to reliably estimate the number of novel classes. Additionally, we adapt two unsupervised clustering algorithms (k-means and Spectral Clustering) to leverage the knowledge of the known classes. Extensive experiments are conducted on 7 tabular datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and hyperparameter tuning process, and show that the NCD problem can be solved without relying on knowledge from the novel classes.

We propose a new shared task for tactical data-to-text generation in the domain of source code libraries. Specifically, we focus on text generation of function descriptions from example software projects. Data is drawn from existing resources used for studying the related problem of semantic parser induction (Richardson and Kuhn, 2017b; Richardson and Kuhn, 2017a), and spans a wide variety of both natural languages and programming languages. In this paper, we describe these existing resources, which will serve as training and development data for the task, and discuss plans for building new independent test sets.

Information extraction(IE) has always been one of the essential tasks of NLP. Moreover, one of the most critical application scenarios of information extraction is the information extraction of resumes. Constructed text is obtained by classifying each part of the resume. It is convenient to store these texts for later search and analysis. Furthermore, the constructed resume data can also be used in the AI resume screening system. Significantly reduce the labor cost of HR. This study aims to transform the information extraction task of resumes into a simple sentence classification task. Based on the English resume dataset produced by the prior study. The classification rules are improved to create a larger and more fine-grained classification dataset of resumes. This corpus is also used to test some current mainstream Pre-training language models (PLMs) performance.Furthermore, in order to explore the relationship between the number of training samples and the correctness rate of the resume dataset, we also performed comparison experiments with training sets of different train set sizes.The final multiple experimental results show that the resume dataset with improved annotation rules and increased sample size of the dataset improves the accuracy of the original resume dataset.

When re-finding items, users who forget or are uncertain about identifying details often rely on creative strategies for expressing their information needs -- complex queries that describe content elements (e.g., book characters or events), information beyond the document text (e.g., descriptions of book covers), or personal context (e.g., when they read a book). This retrieval setting, called tip of the tongue (TOT), is especially challenging for models heavily reliant on lexical and semantic overlap between query and document text. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective framework for handling such complex queries by decomposing the query into individual clues, routing those as sub-queries to specialized retrievers, and ensembling the results. This approach allows us to take advantage of off-the-shelf retrievers (e.g., CLIP for retrieving images of book covers) or incorporate retriever-specific logic (e.g., date constraints). We show that our framework incorportating query decompositions into retrievers can improve gold book recall up to 7% relative again for Recall@5 on a new collection of 14,441 real-world query-book pairs from an online community for resolving TOT inquiries.

Prompt learning's fine-tune performance on text classification tasks has attracted the NLP community. This paper applies it to resume information extraction, improving existing methods for this task. We created manual templates and verbalizers tailored to resume texts and compared the performance of Masked Language Model (MLM) and Seq2Seq PLMs. Also, we enhanced the verbalizer design for Knowledgeable Prompt-tuning, contributing to prompt template design across NLP tasks. We present the Manual Knowledgeable Verbalizer (MKV), a rule for constructing verbalizers for specific applications. Our tests show that MKV rules yield more effective, robust templates and verbalizers than existing methods. Our MKV approach resolved sample imbalance, surpassing current automatic prompt methods. This study underscores the value of tailored prompt learning for resume extraction, stressing the importance of custom-designed templates and verbalizers.

We introduce the Free Music Archive (FMA), an open and easily accessible dataset suitable for evaluating several tasks in MIR, a field concerned with browsing, searching, and organizing large music collections. The community's growing interest in feature and end-to-end learning is however restrained by the limited availability of large audio datasets. The FMA aims to overcome this hurdle by providing 917 GiB and 343 days of Creative Commons-licensed audio from 106,574 tracks from 16,341 artists and 14,854 albums, arranged in a hierarchical taxonomy of 161 genres. It provides full-length and high-quality audio, pre-computed features, together with track- and user-level metadata, tags, and free-form text such as biographies. We here describe the dataset and how it was created, propose a train/validation/test split and three subsets, discuss some suitable MIR tasks, and evaluate some baselines for genre recognition. Code, data, and usage examples are available at https://github.com/mdeff/fma

With infinitely many high-quality data points, infinite computational power, an infinitely large foundation model with a perfect training algorithm and guaranteed zero generalization error on the pretext task, can the model be used for everything? This question cannot be answered by the existing theory of representation, optimization or generalization, because the issues they mainly investigate are assumed to be nonexistent here. In this paper, we show that category theory provides powerful machinery to answer this question. We have proved three results. The first one limits the power of prompt-based learning, saying that the model can solve a downstream task with prompts if and only if the task is representable. The second one says fine tuning does not have this limit, as a foundation model with the minimum required power (up to symmetry) can theoretically solve downstream tasks for the category defined by pretext task, with fine tuning and enough resources. Our final result can be seen as a new type of generalization theorem, showing that the foundation model can generate unseen objects from the target category (e.g., images) using the structural information from the source category (e.g., texts). Along the way, we provide a categorical framework for supervised and self-supervised learning, which might be of independent interest.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on zero-shot classification, i.e. classification when provided merely with a list of class names. In this paper, we tackle the case of zero-shot classification in the presence of unlabeled data. We leverage the graph structure of the unlabeled data and introduce ZLaP, a method based on label propagation (LP) that utilizes geodesic distances for classification. We tailor LP to graphs containing both text and image features and further propose an efficient method for performing inductive inference based on a dual solution and a sparsification step. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our method on 14 common datasets and show that ZLaP outperforms the latest related works. Code: https://github.com/vladan-stojnic/ZLaP

We evaluated the effectiveness of using language models, that were pre-trained in one domain, as the basis for a classification model in another domain: Dutch book reviews. Pre-trained language models have opened up new possibilities for classification tasks with limited labelled data, because representation can be learned in an unsupervised fashion. In our experiments we have studied the effects of training set size (100-1600 items) on the prediction accuracy of a ULMFiT classifier, based on a language models that we pre-trained on the Dutch Wikipedia. We also compared ULMFiT to Support Vector Machines, which is traditionally considered suitable for small collections. We found that ULMFiT outperforms SVM for all training set sizes and that satisfactory results (~90%) can be achieved using training sets that can be manually annotated within a few hours. We deliver both our new benchmark collection of Dutch book reviews for sentiment classification as well as the pre-trained Dutch language model to the community.