Daily Papers

Language agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly valuable as decision-making tools in domains such as gaming and programming. However, these agents often face challenges in achieving high-level goals without detailed instructions and in adapting to environments where feedback is delayed. In this paper, we present SelfGoal, a novel automatic approach designed to enhance agents' capabilities to achieve high-level goals with limited human prior and environmental feedback. The core concept of SelfGoal involves adaptively breaking down a high-level goal into a tree structure of more practical subgoals during the interaction with environments while identifying the most useful subgoals and progressively updating this structure. Experimental results demonstrate that SelfGoal significantly enhances the performance of language agents across various tasks, including competitive, cooperative, and deferred feedback environments. Project page: https://selfgoal-agent.github.io.

In the information retrieval (IR) domain, evaluation plays a crucial role in optimizing search experiences and supporting diverse user intents. In the recent LLM era, research has been conducted to automate document relevance labels, as these labels have traditionally been assigned by crowd-sourced workers - a process that is both time and consuming and costly. This study focuses on LLM-generated usefulness labels, a crucial evaluation metric that considers the user's search intents and task objectives, an aspect where relevance falls short. Our experiment utilizes task-level, query-level, and document-level features along with user search behavior signals, which are essential in defining the usefulness of a document. Our research finds that (i) pre-trained LLMs can generate moderate usefulness labels by understanding the comprehensive search task session, (ii) pre-trained LLMs perform better judgement in short search sessions when provided with search session contexts. Additionally, we investigated whether LLMs can capture the unique divergence between relevance and usefulness, along with conducting an ablation study to identify the most critical metrics for accurate usefulness label generation. In conclusion, this work explores LLM-generated usefulness labels by evaluating critical metrics and optimizing for practicality in real-world settings.

The exponential growth of scientific literature necessitates advanced tools for effective knowledge exploration. We present Knowledge Navigator, a system designed to enhance exploratory search abilities by organizing and structuring the retrieved documents from broad topical queries into a navigable, two-level hierarchy of named and descriptive scientific topics and subtopics. This structured organization provides an overall view of the research themes in a domain, while also enabling iterative search and deeper knowledge discovery within specific subtopics by allowing users to refine their focus and retrieve additional relevant documents. Knowledge Navigator combines LLM capabilities with cluster-based methods to enable an effective browsing method. We demonstrate our approach's effectiveness through automatic and manual evaluations on two novel benchmarks, CLUSTREC-COVID and SCITOC. Our code, prompts, and benchmarks are made publicly available.

Recent work within the Argument Mining community has shown the applicability of Natural Language Processing systems for solving problems found within competitive debate. One of the most important tasks within competitive debate is for debaters to create high quality debate cases. We show that effective debate cases can be constructed using constrained shortest path traversals on Argumentative Semantic Knowledge Graphs. We study this potential in the context of a type of American Competitive Debate, called Policy Debate, which already has a large scale dataset targeting it called DebateSum. We significantly improve upon DebateSum by introducing 53180 new examples, as well as further useful metadata for every example, to the dataset. We leverage the txtai semantic search and knowledge graph toolchain to produce and contribute 9 semantic knowledge graphs built on this dataset. We create a unique method for evaluating which knowledge graphs are better in the context of producing policy debate cases. A demo which automatically generates debate cases, along with all other code and the Knowledge Graphs, are open-sourced and made available to the public here: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/DebateKG

Information retrieval based knowledge base question answering (KBQA) first retrieves a subgraph to reduce search space, then reasons on the subgraph to select answer entities. Existing approaches have three issues that impede the retrieval of such subgraphs. Firstly, there is no off-the-shelf toolkit for semantic-relevant subgraph retrieval. Secondly, existing methods are knowledge-graph-dependent, resulting in outdated knowledge graphs used even in recent studies. Thirdly, previous solutions fail to incorporate the best available techniques for entity linking or path expansion. In this paper, we present SRTK, a user-friendly toolkit for semantic-relevant subgraph retrieval from large-scale knowledge graphs. SRTK is the first toolkit that streamlines the entire lifecycle of subgraph retrieval across multiple knowledge graphs. Additionally, it comes with state-of-the-art subgraph retrieval algorithms, guaranteeing an up-to-date solution set out of the box.

Formal theorem proving, a field at the intersection of mathematics and computer science, has seen renewed interest with advancements in large language models (LLMs). This paper introduces SubgoalXL, a novel approach that synergizes subgoal-based proofs with expert learning to enhance LLMs' capabilities in formal theorem proving within the Isabelle environment. SubgoalXL addresses two critical challenges: the scarcity of specialized mathematics and theorem-proving data, and the need for improved multi-step reasoning abilities in LLMs. By optimizing data efficiency and employing subgoal-level supervision, SubgoalXL extracts richer information from limited human-generated proofs. The framework integrates subgoal-oriented proof strategies with an expert learning system, iteratively refining formal statement, proof, and subgoal generators. Leveraging the Isabelle environment's advantages in subgoal-based proofs, SubgoalXL achieves a new state-of-the-art performance of 56.1\% in Isabelle on the standard miniF2F dataset, marking an absolute improvement of 4.9\%. Notably, SubgoalXL successfully solves 41 AMC12, 9 AIME, and 3 IMO problems from miniF2F. These results underscore the effectiveness of maximizing limited data utility and employing targeted guidance for complex reasoning in formal theorem proving, contributing to the ongoing advancement of AI reasoning capabilities. The implementation is available at https://github.com/zhaoxlpku/SubgoalXL.

Text-rich Graph Knowledge Bases (TG-KBs) have become increasingly crucial for answering queries by providing textual and structural knowledge. However, current retrieval methods often retrieve these two types of knowledge in isolation without considering their mutual reinforcement and some hybrid methods even bypass structural retrieval entirely after neighboring aggregation. To fill in this gap, we propose a Mixture of Structural-and-Textual Retrieval (MoR) to retrieve these two types of knowledge via a Planning-Reasoning-Organizing framework. In the Planning stage, MoR generates textual planning graphs delineating the logic for answering queries. Following planning graphs, in the Reasoning stage, MoR interweaves structural traversal and textual matching to obtain candidates from TG-KBs. In the Organizing stage, MoR further reranks fetched candidates based on their structural trajectory. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of MoR in harmonizing structural and textual retrieval with insights, including uneven retrieving performance across different query logics and the benefits of integrating structural trajectories for candidate reranking. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yoega/MoR.

To deduce new facts on a knowledge graph (KG), a link predictor learns from the graph structure and collects local evidence to find the answer to a given query. However, existing methods suffer from a severe scalability problem due to the utilization of the whole KG for prediction, which hinders their promise on large scale KGs and cannot be directly addressed by vanilla sampling methods. In this work, we propose the one-shot-subgraph link prediction to achieve efficient and adaptive prediction. The design principle is that, instead of directly acting on the whole KG, the prediction procedure is decoupled into two steps, i.e., (i) extracting only one subgraph according to the query and (ii) predicting on this single, query dependent subgraph. We reveal that the non-parametric and computation-efficient heuristics Personalized PageRank (PPR) can effectively identify the potential answers and supporting evidence. With efficient subgraph-based prediction, we further introduce the automated searching of the optimal configurations in both data and model spaces. Empirically, we achieve promoted efficiency and leading performances on five large-scale benchmarks. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/one-shot-subgraph.

Query rewriting aims to generate a new query that can complement the original query to improve the information retrieval system. Recent studies on query rewriting, such as query2doc (Q2D), query2expand (Q2E) and querey2cot (Q2C), rely on the internal knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate a relevant passage to add information to the query. Nevertheless, the efficacy of these methodologies may markedly decline in instances where the requisite knowledge is not encapsulated within the model's intrinsic parameters. In this paper, we propose a novel structured query rewriting method called Crafting the Path tailored for retrieval systems. Crafting the Path involves a three-step process that crafts query-related information necessary for finding the passages to be searched in each step. Specifically, the Crafting the Path begins with Query Concept Comprehension, proceeds to Query Type Identification, and finally conducts Expected Answer Extraction. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous rewriting methods, especially in less familiar domains for LLMs. We demonstrate that our method is less dependent on the internal parameter knowledge of the model and generates queries with fewer factual inaccuracies. Furthermore, we observe that Crafting the Path has less latency compared to the baselines.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) effectively addresses issues of static knowledge and hallucination in large language models. Existing studies mostly focus on question scenarios with clear user intents and concise answers. However, it is prevalent that users issue broad, open-ended queries with diverse sub-intents, for which they desire rich and long-form answers covering multiple relevant aspects. To tackle this important yet underexplored problem, we propose a novel RAG framework, namely RichRAG. It includes a sub-aspect explorer to identify potential sub-aspects of input questions, a multi-faceted retriever to build a candidate pool of diverse external documents related to these sub-aspects, and a generative list-wise ranker, which is a key module to provide the top-k most valuable documents for the final generator. These ranked documents sufficiently cover various query aspects and are aware of the generator's preferences, hence incentivizing it to produce rich and comprehensive responses for users. The training of our ranker involves a supervised fine-tuning stage to ensure the basic coverage of documents, and a reinforcement learning stage to align downstream LLM's preferences to the ranking of documents. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets prove that our framework effectively and efficiently provides comprehensive and satisfying responses to users.

Recent studies show that large language models (LLMs) can be instructed to effectively perform zero-shot passage re-ranking, in which the results of a first stage retrieval method, such as BM25, are rated and reordered to improve relevance. In this work, we improve LLM-based re-ranking by algorithmically selecting few-shot demonstrations to include in the prompt. Our analysis investigates the conditions where demonstrations are most helpful, and shows that adding even one demonstration is significantly beneficial. We propose a novel demonstration selection strategy based on difficulty rather than the commonly used semantic similarity. Furthermore, we find that demonstrations helpful for ranking are also effective at question generation. We hope our work will spur more principled research into question generation and passage ranking.

We present the results and the main findings of SemEval-2020 Task 11 on Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles. The task featured two subtasks. Subtask SI is about Span Identification: given a plain-text document, spot the specific text fragments containing propaganda. Subtask TC is about Technique Classification: given a specific text fragment, in the context of a full document, determine the propaganda technique it uses, choosing from an inventory of 14 possible propaganda techniques. The task attracted a large number of participants: 250 teams signed up to participate and 44 made a submission on the test set. In this paper, we present the task, analyze the results, and discuss the system submissions and the methods they used. For both subtasks, the best systems used pre-trained Transformers and ensembles.

Pretrained transformer models, such as BERT and T5, have shown to be highly effective at ad-hoc passage and document ranking. Due to inherent sequence length limits of these models, they need to be run over a document's passages, rather than processing the entire document sequence at once. Although several approaches for aggregating passage-level signals have been proposed, there has yet to be an extensive comparison of these techniques. In this work, we explore strategies for aggregating relevance signals from a document's passages into a final ranking score. We find that passage representation aggregation techniques can significantly improve over techniques proposed in prior work, such as taking the maximum passage score. We call this new approach PARADE. In particular, PARADE can significantly improve results on collections with broad information needs where relevance signals can be spread throughout the document (such as TREC Robust04 and GOV2). Meanwhile, less complex aggregation techniques may work better on collections with an information need that can often be pinpointed to a single passage (such as TREC DL and TREC Genomics). We also conduct efficiency analyses, and highlight several strategies for improving transformer-based aggregation.

In this work, we focus on the problem of retrieving relevant arguments for a query claim covering diverse aspects. State-of-the-art methods rely on explicit mappings between claims and premises, and thus are unable to utilize large available collections of premises without laborious and costly manual annotation. Their diversity approach relies on removing duplicates via clustering which does not directly ensure that the selected premises cover all aspects. This work introduces a new multi-step approach for the argument retrieval problem. Rather than relying on ground-truth assignments, our approach employs a machine learning model to capture semantic relationships between arguments. Beyond that, it aims to cover diverse facets of the query, instead of trying to identify duplicates explicitly. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that our approach leads to a significant improvement in the argument retrieval task even though it requires less data.

This study explores the proactive ability of LLMs to seek user support. We propose metrics to evaluate the trade-off between performance improvements and user burden, and investigate whether LLMs can determine when to request help under varying information availability. Our experiments show that without external feedback, many LLMs struggle to recognize their need for user support. The findings highlight the importance of external signals and provide insights for future research on improving support-seeking strategies. Source code: https://github.com/appier-research/i-need-help

State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive problem-solving capabilities but may struggle with complex reasoning and factual correctness. Existing methods harness the strengths of chain-of-thought and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to decompose a complex problem into simpler steps and apply retrieval to improve factual correctness. These methods work well on straightforward reasoning tasks but often falter on challenging tasks such as competitive programming and mathematics, due to frequent reasoning errors and irrelevant knowledge retrieval. To address this, we introduce Critic-guided planning with Retrieval-augmentation, CR-Planner, a novel framework that leverages fine-tuned critic models to guide both reasoning and retrieval processes through planning. CR-Planner solves a problem by iteratively selecting and executing sub-goals. Initially, it identifies the most promising sub-goal from reasoning, query generation, and retrieval, guided by rewards given by a critic model named sub-goal critic. It then executes this sub-goal through sampling and selecting the optimal output based on evaluations from another critic model named execution critic. This iterative process, informed by retrieved information and critic models, enables CR-Planner to effectively navigate the solution space towards the final answer. We employ Monte Carlo Tree Search to collect the data for training the critic models, allowing for a systematic exploration of action sequences and their long-term impacts. We validate CR-Planner on challenging domain-knowledge-intensive and reasoning-heavy tasks, including competitive programming, theorem-driven math reasoning, and complex domain retrieval problems. Our experiments demonstrate that CR-Planner significantly outperforms baselines, highlighting its effectiveness in addressing challenging problems by improving both reasoning and retrieval.

LLMs have immense potential for generating plans, transforming an initial world state into a desired goal state. A large body of research has explored the use of LLMs for various planning tasks, from web navigation to travel planning and database querying. However, many of these systems are tailored to specific problems, making it challenging to compare them or determine the best approach for new tasks. There is also a lack of clear and consistent evaluation criteria. Our survey aims to offer a comprehensive overview of current LLM planners to fill this gap. It builds on foundational work by Kartam and Wilkins (1990) and examines six key performance criteria: completeness, executability, optimality, representation, generalization, and efficiency. For each, we provide a thorough analysis of representative works and highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Our paper also identifies crucial future directions, making it a valuable resource for both practitioners and newcomers interested in leveraging LLM planning to support agentic workflows.

Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) models are used to learn continuous representations of entities and relations. A key task in the literature is predicting missing links between entities. However, Knowledge Graphs are not just sets of links but also have semantics underlying their structure. Semantics is crucial in several downstream tasks, such as query answering or reasoning. We introduce the subgraph inference task, where a model has to generate likely and semantically valid subgraphs. We propose IntelliGraphs, a set of five new Knowledge Graph datasets. The IntelliGraphs datasets contain subgraphs with semantics expressed in logical rules for evaluating subgraph inference. We also present the dataset generator that produced the synthetic datasets. We designed four novel baseline models, which include three models based on traditional KGEs. We evaluate their expressiveness and show that these models cannot capture the semantics. We believe this benchmark will encourage the development of machine learning models that emphasize semantic understanding.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is considered to be a promising approach to alleviate the hallucination issue of large language models (LLMs), and it has received widespread attention from researchers recently. Due to the limitation in the semantic understanding of retrieval models, the success of RAG heavily lies on the ability of LLMs to identify passages with utility. Recent efforts have explored the ability of LLMs to assess the relevance of passages in retrieval, but there has been limited work on evaluating the utility of passages in supporting question answering. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study about the capabilities of LLMs in utility evaluation for open-domain QA. Specifically, we introduce a benchmarking procedure and collection of candidate passages with different characteristics, facilitating a series of experiments with five representative LLMs. Our experiments reveal that: (i) well-instructed LLMs can distinguish between relevance and utility, and that LLMs are highly receptive to newly generated counterfactual passages. Moreover, (ii) we scrutinize key factors that affect utility judgments in the instruction design. And finally, (iii) to verify the efficacy of utility judgments in practical retrieval augmentation applications, we delve into LLMs' QA capabilities using the evidence judged with utility and direct dense retrieval results. (iv) We propose a k-sampling, listwise approach to reduce the dependency of LLMs on the sequence of input passages, thereby facilitating subsequent answer generation. We believe that the way we formalize and study the problem along with our findings contributes to a critical assessment of retrieval-augmented LLMs. Our code and benchmark can be found at https://github.com/ict-bigdatalab/utility_judgments.

Passage ranking involves two stages: passage retrieval and passage re-ranking, which are important and challenging topics for both academics and industries in the area of Information Retrieval (IR). However, the commonly-used datasets for passage ranking usually focus on the English language. For non-English scenarios, such as Chinese, the existing datasets are limited in terms of data scale, fine-grained relevance annotation and false negative issues. To address this problem, we introduce T2Ranking, a large-scale Chinese benchmark for passage ranking. T2Ranking comprises more than 300K queries and over 2M unique passages from real-world search engines. Expert annotators are recruited to provide 4-level graded relevance scores (fine-grained) for query-passage pairs instead of binary relevance judgments (coarse-grained). To ease the false negative issues, more passages with higher diversities are considered when performing relevance annotations, especially in the test set, to ensure a more accurate evaluation. Apart from the textual query and passage data, other auxiliary resources are also provided, such as query types and XML files of documents which passages are generated from, to facilitate further studies. To evaluate the dataset, commonly used ranking models are implemented and tested on T2Ranking as baselines. The experimental results show that T2Ranking is challenging and there is still scope for improvement. The full data and all codes are available at https://github.com/THUIR/T2Ranking/

Context: Recent research indicates that Web queries written by software developers are not very successful in retrieving relevant results, performing measurably worse compared to general purpose Web queries. Most approaches up to this point have addressed this problem with software engineering-specific automated query reformulation techniques, which work without developer involvement but are limited by the content of the original query. In other words, these techniques automatically improve the existing query but can not contribute new, previously unmentioned, concepts. Objective: In this paper, we propose a technique to guide software developers in manually improving their own Web search queries. We examine a conversational approach that follows unsuccessful queries with a clarification question aimed at eliciting additional query terms, thus providing to the developer a clear dimension along which the query could be improved. Methods: We describe a set of clarification questions derived from a corpus of software developer queries and a neural approach to recommending them for a newly issued query. Results: Our evaluation indicates that the recommendation technique is accurate, predicting a valid clarification question 80% of the time and outperforms simple baselines, as well as, state-of-the-art Learning To Rank (LTR) baselines. Conclusion: As shown in the experimental results, the described approach is capable at recommending appropriate clarification questions to software developers and considered useful by a sample of developers ranging from novices to experienced professionals.

Multi-hop query answering over a Knowledge Graph (KG) involves traversing one or more hops from the start node to answer a query. Path-based and logic-based methods are state-of-the-art for multi-hop question answering. The former is used in link prediction tasks. The latter is for answering complex logical queries. The logical multi-hop querying technique embeds the KG and queries in the same embedding space. The existing work incorporates First Order Logic (FOL) operators, such as conjunction (wedge), disjunction (vee), and negation (neg), in queries. Though current models have most of the building blocks to execute the FOL queries, they cannot use the dense information of multi-modal entities in the case of Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs). We propose RConE, an embedding method to capture the multi-modal information needed to answer a query. The model first shortlists candidate (multi-modal) entities containing the answer. It then finds the solution (sub-entities) within those entities. Several existing works tackle path-based question-answering in MMKGs. However, to our knowledge, we are the first to introduce logical constructs in querying MMKGs and to answer queries that involve sub-entities of multi-modal entities as the answer. Extensive evaluation of four publicly available MMKGs indicates that RConE outperforms the current state-of-the-art.

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention due to their impressive natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. Recently, many studies have focused on the tool utilization ability of LLMs. They primarily investigated how LLMs effectively collaborate with given specific tools. However, in scenarios where LLMs serve as intelligent agents, as seen in applications like AutoGPT and MetaGPT, LLMs are expected to engage in intricate decision-making processes that involve deciding whether to employ a tool and selecting the most suitable tool(s) from a collection of available tools to fulfill user requests. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce MetaTool, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether LLMs have tool usage awareness and can correctly choose tools. Specifically, we create a dataset called ToolE within the benchmark. This dataset contains various types of user queries in the form of prompts that trigger LLMs to use tools, including both single-tool and multi-tool scenarios. Subsequently, we set the tasks for both tool usage awareness and tool selection. We define four subtasks from different perspectives in tool selection, including tool selection with similar choices, tool selection in specific scenarios, tool selection with possible reliability issues, and multi-tool selection. We conduct experiments involving nine popular LLMs and find that the majority of them still struggle to effectively select tools, highlighting the existing gaps between LLMs and genuine intelligent agents. However, through the error analysis, we found there is still significant room for improvement. Finally, we conclude with insights for tool developers that follow ChatGPT to provide detailed descriptions that can enhance the tool selection performance of LLMs.

Existing question answering (QA) datasets are no longer challenging to most powerful Large Language Models (LLMs). Traditional QA benchmarks like TriviaQA, NaturalQuestions, ELI5 and HotpotQA mainly study ``known unknowns'' with clear indications of both what information is missing, and how to find it to answer the question. Hence, good performance on these benchmarks provides a false sense of security. A yet unmet need of the NLP community is a bank of non-factoid, multi-perspective questions involving a great deal of unclear information needs, i.e. ``unknown uknowns''. We claim we can find such questions in search engine logs, which is surprising because most question-intent queries are indeed factoid. We present Researchy Questions, a dataset of search engine queries tediously filtered to be non-factoid, ``decompositional'' and multi-perspective. We show that users spend a lot of ``effort'' on these questions in terms of signals like clicks and session length, and that they are also challenging for GPT-4. We also show that ``slow thinking'' answering techniques, like decomposition into sub-questions shows benefit over answering directly. We release sim 100k Researchy Questions, along with the Clueweb22 URLs that were clicked.

This paper contains what the Georgetown InfoSense group has done in regard to solving the challenges presented by TREC iKAT 2023. Our submitted runs outperform the median runs by a significant margin, exhibiting superior performance in nDCG across various cut numbers and in overall success rate. Our approach uses a Generate-Retrieve-Generate method, which we've found to greatly outpace Retrieve-Then-Generate approaches for the purposes of iKAT. Our solution involves the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for initial answers, answer grounding by BM25, passage quality filtering by logistic regression, and answer generation by LLMs again. We leverage several purpose-built Language Models, including BERT, Chat-based, and text-to-transfer-based models, for text understanding, classification, generation, and summarization. The official results of the TREC evaluation contradict our initial self-evaluation, which may suggest that a decrease in the reliance on our retrieval and classification methods is better. Nonetheless, our findings suggest that the sequence of involving these different components matters, where we see an essentiality of using LLMs before using search engines.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have been used to support a wide range of applications, from web search to personal assistant. In this paper, we describe three generations of knowledge graphs: entity-based KGs, which have been supporting general search and question answering (e.g., at Google and Bing); text-rich KGs, which have been supporting search and recommendations for products, bio-informatics, etc. (e.g., at Amazon and Alibaba); and the emerging integration of KGs and LLMs, which we call dual neural KGs. We describe the characteristics of each generation of KGs, the crazy ideas behind the scenes in constructing such KGs, and the techniques developed over time to enable industry impact. In addition, we use KGs as examples to demonstrate a recipe to evolve research ideas from innovations to production practice, and then to the next level of innovations, to advance both science and business.

GraphRAG addresses significant challenges in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by leveraging graphs with embedded knowledge to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite its promising potential, the GraphRAG community currently lacks a unified framework for fine-grained decomposition of the graph-based knowledge retrieval process. Furthermore, there is no systematic categorization or evaluation of existing solutions within the retrieval process. In this paper, we present LEGO-GraphRAG, a modular framework that decomposes the retrieval process of GraphRAG into three interconnected modules: subgraph-extraction, path-filtering, and path-refinement. We systematically summarize and classify the algorithms and neural network (NN) models relevant to each module, providing a clearer understanding of the design space for GraphRAG instances. Additionally, we identify key design factors, such as Graph Coupling and Computational Cost, that influence the effectiveness of GraphRAG implementations. Through extensive empirical studies, we construct high-quality GraphRAG instances using a representative selection of solutions and analyze their impact on retrieval and reasoning performance. Our findings offer critical insights into optimizing GraphRAG instance design, ultimately contributing to the advancement of more accurate and contextually relevant LLM applications.

Information retrieval methods often rely on a single embedding model trained on large, general-domain datasets like MSMARCO. While this approach can produce a retriever with reasonable overall performance, models trained on domain-specific data often yield better results within their respective domains. While prior work in information retrieval has tackled this through multi-task training, the topic of combining multiple domain-specific expert retrievers remains unexplored, despite its popularity in language model generation. In this work, we introduce RouterRetriever, a retrieval model that leverages multiple domain-specific experts along with a routing mechanism to select the most appropriate expert for each query. It is lightweight and allows easy addition or removal of experts without additional training. Evaluation on the BEIR benchmark demonstrates that RouterRetriever outperforms both MSMARCO-trained (+2.1 absolute nDCG@10) and multi-task trained (+3.2) models. This is achieved by employing our routing mechanism, which surpasses other routing techniques (+1.8 on average) commonly used in language modeling. Furthermore, the benefit generalizes well to other datasets, even in the absence of a specific expert on the dataset. To our knowledge, RouterRetriever is the first work to demonstrate the advantages of using multiple domain-specific expert embedding models with effective routing over a single, general-purpose embedding model in retrieval tasks.

Retrieval models are often evaluated on partially-annotated datasets. Each query is mapped to a few relevant texts and the remaining corpus is assumed to be irrelevant. As a result, models that successfully retrieve false negatives are punished in evaluation. Unfortunately, completely annotating all texts for every query is not resource efficient. In this work, we show that using partially-annotated datasets in evaluation can paint a distorted picture. We curate D-MERIT, a passage retrieval evaluation set from Wikipedia, aspiring to contain all relevant passages for each query. Queries describe a group (e.g., ``journals about linguistics'') and relevant passages are evidence that entities belong to the group (e.g., a passage indicating that Language is a journal about linguistics). We show that evaluating on a dataset containing annotations for only a subset of the relevant passages might result in misleading ranking of the retrieval systems and that as more relevant texts are included in the evaluation set, the rankings converge. We propose our dataset as a resource for evaluation and our study as a recommendation for balance between resource-efficiency and reliable evaluation when annotating evaluation sets for text retrieval.

A subgraph is constructed by using a subset of vertices and edges of a given graph. There exist many graph properties that are hereditary for subgraphs. Hence, researchers from different communities have paid a great deal of attention in studying numerous subgraph problems, on top of the ordinary graph problems. Many algorithms are proposed in studying subgraph problems, where one common approach is by extracting the patterns and structures of a given graph. Due to the complex structures of certain types of graphs and to improve overall performances of the existing frameworks, machine learning techniques have recently been employed in dealing with various subgraph problems. In this article, we present a comprehensive review on five well known subgraph problems that have been tackled by using machine learning methods. They are subgraph isomorphism (both counting and matching), maximum common subgraph, community detection and community search problems. We provide an outline of each proposed method, and examine its designs and performances. We also explore non-learning-based algorithms for each problem and a brief discussion is given. We then suggest some promising research directions in this area, hoping that relevant subgraph problems can be tackled by using a similar strategy. Since there is a huge growth in employing machine learning techniques in recent years, we believe that this survey will serve as a good reference point to relevant research communities.

In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being integrated into search engines to provide natural language responses tailored to user queries. Customers and end-users are also becoming more dependent on these models for quick and easy purchase decisions. In this work, we investigate whether recommendations from LLMs can be manipulated to enhance a product's visibility. We demonstrate that adding a strategic text sequence (STS) -- a carefully crafted message -- to a product's information page can significantly increase its likelihood of being listed as the LLM's top recommendation. To understand the impact of STS, we use a catalog of fictitious coffee machines and analyze its effect on two target products: one that seldom appears in the LLM's recommendations and another that usually ranks second. We observe that the strategic text sequence significantly enhances the visibility of both products by increasing their chances of appearing as the top recommendation. This ability to manipulate LLM-generated search responses provides vendors with a considerable competitive advantage and has the potential to disrupt fair market competition. Just as search engine optimization (SEO) revolutionized how webpages are customized to rank higher in search engine results, influencing LLM recommendations could profoundly impact content optimization for AI-driven search services. Code for our experiments is available at https://github.com/aounon/llm-rank-optimizer.

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.

Interactions with large language models (LLMs) often yield long and detailed responses, leveraging both parametric knowledge and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). While these responses can provide rich insights, they often include redundant or less engaging content not aligned with user interests. This issue becomes apparent when users specify particular subtopics to include or exclude -- termed coverage-conditioned (C^2) queries -- as LLMs often struggle to provide tailored responses. To address this challenge, we investigate the role of query outlines, sequences of subqueries designed to guide LLMs in generating responses that meet specific user requirements. To systematically create and evaluate these outlines, we introduce QTree, a dataset of 10K hierarchical sets of information-seeking subqueries that define structured boundaries for outline creation and evaluation in C^2 scenarios. Additionally, we develop QPlanner, a 7B language model trained to generate customized outlines within boundaries of QTree. We evaluate the effectiveness of the generated outlines through automatic and human judgements, focusing on their impact within retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. Experimental results demonstrate that QPlanner, especially when trained with alignment techniques like DPO, generates higher-quality outlines that better fulfill diverse user needs.

Ranking is a fundamental and popular problem in search. However, existing ranking algorithms usually restrict the granularity of ranking to full passages or require a specific dense index for each desired level of granularity. Such lack of flexibility in granularity negatively affects many applications that can benefit from more granular ranking, such as sentence-level ranking for open-domain question-answering, or proposition-level ranking for attribution. In this work, we introduce the idea of any-granularity ranking, which leverages multi-vector embeddings to rank at varying levels of granularity while maintaining encoding at a single (coarser) level of granularity. We propose a multi-granular contrastive loss for training multi-vector approaches, and validate its utility with both sentences and propositions as ranking units. Finally, we demonstrate the application of proposition-level ranking to post-hoc citation addition in retrieval-augmented generation, surpassing the performance of prompt-driven citation generation.

Multimodal LLMs are the natural evolution of LLMs, and enlarge their capabilities so as to work beyond the pure textual modality. As research is being carried out to design novel architectures and vision-and-language adapters, in this paper we concentrate on endowing such models with the capability of answering questions that require external knowledge. Our approach, termed Wiki-LLaVA, aims at integrating an external knowledge source of multimodal documents, which is accessed through a hierarchical retrieval pipeline. Relevant passages, using this approach, are retrieved from the external knowledge source and employed as additional context for the LLM, augmenting the effectiveness and precision of generated dialogues. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets tailored for visual question answering with external data and demonstrate the appropriateness of our approach.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown the potential to be integrated into human daily lives. Therefore, user preference is the most critical criterion for assessing LLMs' performance in real-world scenarios. However, existing benchmarks mainly focus on measuring models' accuracy using multi-choice questions, which limits the understanding of their capabilities in real applications. We fill this gap by proposing a comprehensive Chinese benchmark SuperCLUE, named after another popular Chinese LLM benchmark CLUE. SuperCLUE encompasses three sub-tasks: actual users' queries and ratings derived from an LLM battle platform (CArena), open-ended questions with single and multiple-turn dialogues (OPEN), and closed-ended questions with the same stems as open-ended single-turn ones (CLOSE). Our study shows that accuracy on closed-ended questions is insufficient to reflect human preferences achieved on open-ended ones. At the same time, they can complement each other to predict actual user preferences. We also demonstrate that GPT-4 is a reliable judge to automatically evaluate human preferences on open-ended questions in a Chinese context. Our benchmark will be released at https://www.CLUEbenchmarks.com

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.

Online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia, have been well-developed and researched in the last two decades. One can find any attributes or other information of a wiki item on a wiki page edited by a community of volunteers. However, the traditional text, images and tables can hardly express some aspects of an wiki item. For example, when we talk about ``Shiba Inu'', one may care more about ``How to feed it'' or ``How to train it not to protect its food''. Currently, short-video platforms have become a hallmark in the online world. Whether you're on TikTok, Instagram, Kuaishou, or YouTube Shorts, short-video apps have changed how we consume and create content today. Except for producing short videos for entertainment, we can find more and more authors sharing insightful knowledge widely across all walks of life. These short videos, which we call knowledge videos, can easily express any aspects (e.g. hair or how-to-feed) consumers want to know about an item (e.g. Shiba Inu), and they can be systematically analyzed and organized like an online encyclopedia. In this paper, we propose Kuaipedia, a large-scale multi-modal encyclopedia consisting of items, aspects, and short videos lined to them, which was extracted from billions of videos of Kuaishou (Kwai), a well-known short-video platform in China. We first collected items from multiple sources and mined user-centered aspects from millions of users' queries to build an item-aspect tree. Then we propose a new task called ``multi-modal item-aspect linking'' as an expansion of ``entity linking'' to link short videos into item-aspect pairs and build the whole short-video encyclopedia. Intrinsic evaluations show that our encyclopedia is of large scale and highly accurate. We also conduct sufficient extrinsic experiments to show how Kuaipedia can help fundamental applications such as entity typing and entity linking.

Keeping track of all relevant recent publications and experimental results for a research area is a challenging task. Prior work has demonstrated the efficacy of information extraction models in various scientific areas. Recently, several datasets have been released for the yet understudied materials science domain. However, these datasets focus on sub-problems such as parsing synthesis procedures or on sub-domains, e.g., solid oxide fuel cells. In this resource paper, we present MuLMS, a new dataset of 50 open-access articles, spanning seven sub-domains of materials science. The corpus has been annotated by domain experts with several layers ranging from named entities over relations to frame structures. We present competitive neural models for all tasks and demonstrate that multi-task training with existing related resources leads to benefits.

We present the results and the main findings of SemEval-2024 Task 8: Multigenerator, Multidomain, and Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection. The task featured three subtasks. Subtask A is a binary classification task determining whether a text is written by a human or generated by a machine. This subtask has two tracks: a monolingual track focused solely on English texts and a multilingual track. Subtask B is to detect the exact source of a text, discerning whether it is written by a human or generated by a specific LLM. Subtask C aims to identify the changing point within a text, at which the authorship transitions from human to machine. The task attracted a large number of participants: subtask A monolingual (126), subtask A multilingual (59), subtask B (70), and subtask C (30). In this paper, we present the task, analyze the results, and discuss the system submissions and the methods they used. For all subtasks, the best systems used LLMs.

Since the recent prosperity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been interleaved discussions regarding how to reduce hallucinations from LLM responses, how to increase the factuality of LLMs, and whether Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which store the world knowledge in a symbolic form, will be replaced with LLMs. In this paper, we try to answer these questions from a new angle: How knowledgeable are LLMs? To answer this question, we constructed Head-to-Tail, a benchmark that consists of 18K question-answer (QA) pairs regarding head, torso, and tail facts in terms of popularity. We designed an automated evaluation method and a set of metrics that closely approximate the knowledge an LLM confidently internalizes. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 14 publicly available LLMs, we show that existing LLMs are still far from being perfect in terms of their grasp of factual knowledge, especially for facts of torso-to-tail entities.

Retrieving external knowledge and prompting large language models with relevant information is an effective paradigm to enhance the performance of question-answering tasks. Previous research typically handles paragraphs from external documents in isolation, resulting in a lack of context and ambiguous references, particularly in multi-document and complex tasks. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new retrieval framework IIER, that leverages Inter-chunk Interactions to Enhance Retrieval. This framework captures the internal connections between document chunks by considering three types of interactions: structural, keyword, and semantic. We then construct a unified Chunk-Interaction Graph to represent all external documents comprehensively. Additionally, we design a graph-based evidence chain retriever that utilizes previous paths and chunk interactions to guide the retrieval process. It identifies multiple seed nodes based on the target question and iteratively searches for relevant chunks to gather supporting evidence. This retrieval process refines the context and reasoning chain, aiding the large language model in reasoning and answer generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IIER outperforms strong baselines across four datasets, highlighting its effectiveness in improving retrieval and reasoning capabilities.

In this work we address the problem of argument search. The purpose of argument search is the distillation of pro and contra arguments for requested topics from large text corpora. In previous works, the usual approach is to use a standard search engine to extract text parts which are relevant to the given topic and subsequently use an argument recognition algorithm to select arguments from them. The main challenge in the argument recognition task, which is also known as argument mining, is that often sentences containing arguments are structurally similar to purely informative sentences without any stance about the topic. In fact, they only differ semantically. Most approaches use topic or search term information only for the first search step and therefore assume that arguments can be classified independently of a topic. We argue that topic information is crucial for argument mining, since the topic defines the semantic context of an argument. Precisely, we propose different models for the classification of arguments, which take information about a topic of an argument into account. Moreover, to enrich the context of a topic and to let models understand the context of the potential argument better, we integrate information from different external sources such as Knowledge Graphs or pre-trained NLP models. Our evaluation shows that considering topic information, especially in connection with external information, provides a significant performance boost for the argument mining task.

The Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization (ML4CO) NeurIPS 2021 competition aims to improve state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components with machine learning models. On the dual task, we design models to make branching decisions to promote the dual bound increase faster. We propose a knowledge inheritance method to generalize knowledge of different models from the dataset aggregation process, named KIDA. Our improvement overcomes some defects of the baseline graph-neural-networks-based methods. Further, we won the 1st Place on the dual task. We hope this report can provide useful experience for developers and researchers. The code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/NeurIPS2021-ML4CO-KIDA.

Conventional representation learning algorithms for knowledge graphs (KG) map each entity to a unique embedding vector. Such a shallow lookup results in a linear growth of memory consumption for storing the embedding matrix and incurs high computational costs when working with real-world KGs. Drawing parallels with subword tokenization commonly used in NLP, we explore the landscape of more parameter-efficient node embedding strategies with possibly sublinear memory requirements. To this end, we propose NodePiece, an anchor-based approach to learn a fixed-size entity vocabulary. In NodePiece, a vocabulary of subword/sub-entity units is constructed from anchor nodes in a graph with known relation types. Given such a fixed-size vocabulary, it is possible to bootstrap an encoding and embedding for any entity, including those unseen during training. Experiments show that NodePiece performs competitively in node classification, link prediction, and relation prediction tasks while retaining less than 10% of explicit nodes in a graph as anchors and often having 10x fewer parameters. To this end, we show that a NodePiece-enabled model outperforms existing shallow models on a large OGB WikiKG 2 graph having 70x fewer parameters.

This presentation focuses on the importance of web crawling and page ranking algorithms in dealing with the massive amount of data present on the World Wide Web. As the web continues to grow exponentially, efficient search and retrieval methods become crucial. Web crawling is a process that converts unstructured data into structured data, enabling effective information retrieval. Additionally, page ranking algorithms play a significant role in assessing the quality and popularity of web pages. The presentation explores the background of these algorithms and evaluates five different crawling algorithms: Shark Search, Priority-Based Queue, Naive Bayes, Breadth-First, and Depth-First. The goal is to identify the most effective algorithm for crawling web pages. By understanding these algorithms, we can enhance our ability to navigate the web and extract valuable information efficiently.

Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years, thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip. While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and related publications quite sparse. The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second, we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet under-researched, directions in the field.

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%.

The web provides a rich, open-domain environment with textual, structural, and spatial properties. We propose a new task for grounding language in this environment: given a natural language command (e.g., "click on the second article"), choose the correct element on the web page (e.g., a hyperlink or text box). We collected a dataset of over 50,000 commands that capture various phenomena such as functional references (e.g. "find who made this site"), relational reasoning (e.g. "article by john"), and visual reasoning (e.g. "top-most article"). We also implemented and analyzed three baseline models that capture different phenomena present in the dataset.

We study prompting-based approaches with Large Language Models (LLMs) for modifying documents so as to promote their ranking in a competitive search setting. Our methods are inspired by prior work on leveraging LLMs as rankers. We evaluate our approach by deploying it as a bot in previous ranking competitions and in competitions we organized. Our findings demonstrate that our approach effectively improves document ranking while preserving high levels of faithfulness to the original content and maintaining overall document quality.

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.

The integration of retrieved passages and large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPTs, has significantly contributed to improving open-domain question answering. However, there is still a lack of exploration regarding the optimal approach for incorporating retrieved passages into the answer generation process. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating different methods of combining retrieved passages with LLMs to enhance answer generation. We begin by examining the limitations of a commonly-used concatenation approach. Surprisingly, this approach often results in generating "unknown" outputs, even when the correct document is among the top-k retrieved passages. To address this issue, we explore four alternative strategies for integrating the retrieved passages with the LLMs. These strategies include two single-round methods that utilize chain-of-thought reasoning and two multi-round strategies that incorporate feedback loops. Through comprehensive analyses and experiments, we provide insightful observations on how to effectively leverage retrieved passages to enhance the answer generation capability of LLMs.

A machine learning system can score well on a given test set by relying on heuristics that are effective for frequent example types but break down in more challenging cases. We study this issue within natural language inference (NLI), the task of determining whether one sentence entails another. We hypothesize that statistical NLI models may adopt three fallible syntactic heuristics: the lexical overlap heuristic, the subsequence heuristic, and the constituent heuristic. To determine whether models have adopted these heuristics, we introduce a controlled evaluation set called HANS (Heuristic Analysis for NLI Systems), which contains many examples where the heuristics fail. We find that models trained on MNLI, including BERT, a state-of-the-art model, perform very poorly on HANS, suggesting that they have indeed adopted these heuristics. We conclude that there is substantial room for improvement in NLI systems, and that the HANS dataset can motivate and measure progress in this area

In populous countries, pending legal cases have been growing exponentially. There is a need for developing NLP-based techniques for processing and automatically understanding legal documents. To promote research in the area of Legal NLP we organized the shared task LegalEval - Understanding Legal Texts at SemEval 2023. LegalEval task has three sub-tasks: Task-A (Rhetorical Roles Labeling) is about automatically structuring legal documents into semantically coherent units, Task-B (Legal Named Entity Recognition) deals with identifying relevant entities in a legal document and Task-C (Court Judgement Prediction with Explanation) explores the possibility of automatically predicting the outcome of a legal case along with providing an explanation for the prediction. In total 26 teams (approx. 100 participants spread across the world) submitted systems paper. In each of the sub-tasks, the proposed systems outperformed the baselines; however, there is a lot of scope for improvement. This paper describes the tasks, and analyzes techniques proposed by various teams.

Query understanding is a fundamental problem in information retrieval (IR), which has attracted continuous attention through the past decades. Many different tasks have been proposed for understanding users' search queries, e.g., query classification or query clustering. However, it is not that precise to understand a search query at the intent class/cluster level due to the loss of many detailed information. As we may find in many benchmark datasets, e.g., TREC and SemEval, queries are often associated with a detailed description provided by human annotators which clearly describes its intent to help evaluate the relevance of the documents. If a system could automatically generate a detailed and precise intent description for a search query, like human annotators, that would indicate much better query understanding has been achieved. In this paper, therefore, we propose a novel Query-to-Intent-Description (Q2ID) task for query understanding. Unlike those existing ranking tasks which leverage the query and its description to compute the relevance of documents, Q2ID is a reverse task which aims to generate a natural language intent description based on both relevant and irrelevant documents of a given query. To address this new task, we propose a novel Contrastive Generation model, namely CtrsGen for short, to generate the intent description by contrasting the relevant documents with the irrelevant documents given a query. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model by comparing with several state-of-the-art generation models on the Q2ID task. We discuss the potential usage of such Q2ID technique through an example application.

Scientific literature review generation aims to extract and organize important information from an abundant collection of reference papers and produces corresponding reviews while lacking a clear and logical hierarchy. We observe that a high-quality catalogue-guided generation process can effectively alleviate this problem. Therefore, we present an atomic and challenging task named Hierarchical Catalogue Generation for Literature Review as the first step for review generation, which aims to produce a hierarchical catalogue of a review paper given various references. We construct a novel English Hierarchical Catalogues of Literature Reviews Dataset with 7.6k literature review catalogues and 389k reference papers. To accurately assess the model performance, we design two evaluation metrics for informativeness and similarity to ground truth from semantics and structure.Our extensive analyses verify the high quality of our dataset and the effectiveness of our evaluation metrics. We further benchmark diverse experiments on state-of-the-art summarization models like BART and large language models like ChatGPT to evaluate their capabilities. We further discuss potential directions for this task to motivate future research.

Extending context windows (i.e., Long Context, LC) and using retrievers to selectively access relevant information (i.e., Retrieval-Augmented Generation, RAG) are the two main strategies to enable LLMs to incorporate extremely long external contexts. This paper revisits recent studies on this topic, highlighting their key insights and discrepancies. We then provide a more comprehensive evaluation by filtering out questions answerable without external context, identifying the most effective retrieval methods, and expanding the datasets. We show that LC generally outperforms RAG in question-answering benchmarks, especially for Wikipedia-based questions. Summarization-based retrieval performs comparably to LC, while chunk-based retrieval lags behind. However, RAG has advantages in dialogue-based and general question queries. These insights underscore the trade-offs between RAG and LC strategies, offering guidance for future optimization of LLMs with external knowledge sources. We also provide an in-depth discussion on this topic, highlighting the overlooked importance of context relevance in existing studies.

We present Semi-Structured Explanations for COPA (COPA-SSE), a new crowdsourced dataset of 9,747 semi-structured, English common sense explanations for Choice of Plausible Alternatives (COPA) questions. The explanations are formatted as a set of triple-like common sense statements with ConceptNet relations but freely written concepts. This semi-structured format strikes a balance between the high quality but low coverage of structured data and the lower quality but high coverage of free-form crowdsourcing. Each explanation also includes a set of human-given quality ratings. With their familiar format, the explanations are geared towards commonsense reasoners operating on knowledge graphs and serve as a starting point for ongoing work on improving such systems. The dataset is available at https://github.com/a-brassard/copa-sse.

Competitive Debate's increasingly technical nature has left competitors looking for tools to accelerate evidence production. We find that the unique type of extractive summarization performed by competitive debaters - summarization with a bias towards a particular target meaning - can be performed using the latest innovations in unsupervised pre-trained text vectorization models. We introduce CX_DB8, a queryable word-level extractive summarizer and evidence creation framework, which allows for rapid, biasable summarization of arbitarily sized texts. CX_DB8s usage of the embedding framework Flair means that as the underlying models improve, CX_DB8 will also improve. We observe that CX_DB8 also functions as a semantic search engine, and has application as a supplement to traditional "find" functionality in programs and webpages. CX_DB8 is currently used by competitive debaters and is made available to the public at https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/CX_DB8

The rise of large language models (LLMs) had a transformative impact on search, ushering in a new era of search engines that are capable of generating search results in natural language text, imbued with citations for supporting sources. Building generative information-seeking models demands openly accessible datasets, which currently remain lacking. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset, HAGRID (Human-in-the-loop Attributable Generative Retrieval for Information-seeking Dataset) for building end-to-end generative information-seeking models that are capable of retrieving candidate quotes and generating attributed explanations. Unlike recent efforts that focus on human evaluation of black-box proprietary search engines, we built our dataset atop the English subset of MIRACL, a publicly available information retrieval dataset. HAGRID is constructed based on human and LLM collaboration. We first automatically collect attributed explanations that follow an in-context citation style using an LLM, i.e. GPT-3.5. Next, we ask human annotators to evaluate the LLM explanations based on two criteria: informativeness and attributability. HAGRID serves as a catalyst for the development of information-seeking models with better attribution capabilities.

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the accuracy and relevance of responses by generative language models, it falls short in graph-based contexts where both textual and topological information are important. Naive RAG approaches inherently neglect the structural intricacies of textual graphs, resulting in a critical gap in the generation process. To address this challenge, we introduce Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GRAG), which significantly enhances both the retrieval and generation processes by emphasizing the importance of subgraph structures. Unlike RAG approaches that focus solely on text-based entity retrieval, GRAG maintains an acute awareness of graph topology, which is crucial for generating contextually and factually coherent responses. Our GRAG approach consists of four main stages: indexing of k-hop ego-graphs, graph retrieval, soft pruning to mitigate the impact of irrelevant entities, and generation with pruned textual subgraphs. GRAG's core workflow-retrieving textual subgraphs followed by soft pruning-efficiently identifies relevant subgraph structures while avoiding the computational infeasibility typical of exhaustive subgraph searches, which are NP-hard. Moreover, we propose a novel prompting strategy that achieves lossless conversion from textual subgraphs to hierarchical text descriptions. Extensive experiments on graph multi-hop reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that in scenarios requiring multi-hop reasoning on textual graphs, our GRAG approach significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art RAG methods while effectively mitigating hallucinations.

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.

This paper introduces BLaIR, a series of pretrained sentence embedding models specialized for recommendation scenarios. BLaIR is trained to learn correlations between item metadata and potential natural language context, which is useful for retrieving and recommending items. To pretrain BLaIR, we collect Amazon Reviews 2023, a new dataset comprising over 570 million reviews and 48 million items from 33 categories, significantly expanding beyond the scope of previous versions. We evaluate the generalization ability of BLaIR across multiple domains and tasks, including a new task named complex product search, referring to retrieving relevant items given long, complex natural language contexts. Leveraging large language models like ChatGPT, we correspondingly construct a semi-synthetic evaluation set, Amazon-C4. Empirical results on the new task, as well as conventional retrieval and recommendation tasks, demonstrate that BLaIR exhibit strong text and item representation capacity. Our datasets, code, and checkpoints are available at: https://github.com/hyp1231/AmazonReviews2023.

Extracting meaningful insights from large and complex datasets poses significant challenges, particularly in ensuring the accuracy and relevance of retrieved information. Traditional data retrieval methods such as sequential search and index-based retrieval often fail when handling intricate and interconnected data structures, resulting in incomplete or misleading outputs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Structured-GraphRAG, a versatile framework designed to enhance information retrieval across structured datasets in natural language queries. Structured-GraphRAG utilizes multiple knowledge graphs, which represent data in a structured format and capture complex relationships between entities, enabling a more nuanced and comprehensive retrieval of information. This graph-based approach reduces the risk of errors in language model outputs by grounding responses in a structured format, thereby enhancing the reliability of results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Structured-GraphRAG by comparing its performance with that of a recently published method using traditional retrieval-augmented generation. Our findings show that Structured-GraphRAG significantly improves query processing efficiency and reduces response times. While our case study focuses on soccer data, the framework's design is broadly applicable, offering a powerful tool for data analysis and enhancing language model applications across various structured domains.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a cost-effective approach to injecting real-time knowledge into large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, constructing and validating high-quality knowledge repositories require considerable effort. We propose a pre-retrieval framework named Pseudo-Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (PG-RAG), which conceptualizes LLMs as students by providing them with abundant raw reading materials and encouraging them to engage in autonomous reading to record factual information in their own words. The resulting concise, well-organized mental indices are interconnected through common topics or complementary facts to form a pseudo-graph database. During the retrieval phase, PG-RAG mimics the human behavior in flipping through notes, identifying fact paths and subsequently exploring the related contexts. Adhering to the principle of the path taken by many is the best, it integrates highly corroborated fact paths to provide a structured and refined sub-graph assisting LLMs. We validated PG-RAG on three specialized question-answering datasets. In single-document tasks, PG-RAG significantly outperformed the current best baseline, KGP-LLaMA, across all key evaluation metrics, with an average overall performance improvement of 11.6%. Specifically, its BLEU score increased by approximately 14.3%, and the QE-F1 metric improved by 23.7%. In multi-document scenarios, the average metrics of PG-RAG were at least 2.35% higher than the best baseline. Notably, the BLEU score and QE-F1 metric showed stable improvements of around 7.55% and 12.75%, respectively. Our code: https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/PGRAG.

Listwise rerankers based on large language models (LLM) are the zero-shot state-of-the-art. However, current works in this direction all depend on the GPT models, making it a single point of failure in scientific reproducibility. Moreover, it raises the concern that the current research findings only hold for GPT models but not LLM in general. In this work, we lift this pre-condition and build for the first time effective listwise rerankers without any form of dependency on GPT. Our passage retrieval experiments show that our best list se reranker surpasses the listwise rerankers based on GPT-3.5 by 13% and achieves 97% effectiveness of the ones built on GPT-4. Our results also show that the existing training datasets, which were expressly constructed for pointwise ranking, are insufficient for building such listwise rerankers. Instead, high-quality listwise ranking data is required and crucial, calling for further work on building human-annotated listwise data resources.

The limited generalization of coreference resolution (CR) models has been a major bottleneck in the task's broad application. Prior work has identified annotation differences, especially for mention detection, as one of the main reasons for the generalization gap and proposed using additional annotated target domain data. Rather than relying on this additional annotation, we propose an alternative referential task, Major Entity Identification (MEI), where we: (a) assume the target entities to be specified in the input, and (b) limit the task to only the frequent entities. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MEI models generalize well across domains on multiple datasets with supervised models and LLM-based few-shot prompting. Additionally, MEI fits the classification framework, which enables the use of robust and intuitive classification-based metrics. Finally, MEI is also of practical use as it allows a user to search for all mentions of a particular entity or a group of entities of interest.

Neural networks -- especially those that use large, pre-trained language models -- have improved search engines in various ways. Most prominently, they can estimate the relevance of a passage or document to a user's query. In this work, we depart from this direction by exploring whether neural networks can effectively predict which of a document's passages are unlikely to be relevant to any query submitted to the search engine. We refer to this query-agnostic estimation of passage relevance as a passage's quality. We find that our novel methods for estimating passage quality allow passage corpora to be pruned considerably while maintaining statistically equivalent effectiveness; our best methods can consistently prune >25% of passages in a corpora, across various retrieval pipelines. Such substantial pruning reduces the operating costs of neural search engines in terms of computing resources, power usage, and carbon footprint -- both when processing queries (thanks to a smaller index size) and when indexing (lightweight models can prune low-quality passages prior to the costly dense or learned sparse encoding step). This work sets the stage for developing more advanced neural "learning-what-to-index" methods.

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.

Writing an ad text that attracts people and persuades them to click or act is essential for the success of search engine advertising. Therefore, ad creators must consider various aspects of advertising appeals (A^3) such as the price, product features, and quality. However, products and services exhibit unique effective A^3 for different industries. In this work, we focus on exploring the effective A^3 for different industries with the aim of assisting the ad creation process. To this end, we created a dataset of advertising appeals and used an existing model that detects various aspects for ad texts. Our experiments demonstrated that different industries have their own effective A^3 and that the identification of the A^3 contributes to the estimation of advertising performance.

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.

Recent breakthroughs in large language modeling have facilitated rigorous exploration of their application in diverse tasks related to tabular data modeling, such as prediction, tabular data synthesis, question answering, and table understanding. Each task presents unique challenges and opportunities. However, there is currently a lack of comprehensive review that summarizes and compares the key techniques, metrics, datasets, models, and optimization approaches in this research domain. This survey aims to address this gap by consolidating recent progress in these areas, offering a thorough survey and taxonomy of the datasets, metrics, and methodologies utilized. It identifies strengths, limitations, unexplored territories, and gaps in the existing literature, while providing some insights for future research directions in this vital and rapidly evolving field. It also provides relevant code and datasets references. Through this comprehensive review, we hope to provide interested readers with pertinent references and insightful perspectives, empowering them with the necessary tools and knowledge to effectively navigate and address the prevailing challenges in the field.

This paper presents EasyRAG, a simple, lightweight, and efficient retrieval-augmented generation framework for automated network operations. Our framework has three advantages. The first is accurate question answering. We designed a straightforward RAG scheme based on (1) a specific data processing workflow (2) dual-route sparse retrieval for coarse ranking (3) LLM Reranker for reranking (4) LLM answer generation and optimization. This approach achieved first place in the GLM4 track in the preliminary round and second place in the GLM4 track in the semifinals. The second is simple deployment. Our method primarily consists of BM25 retrieval and BGE-reranker reranking, requiring no fine-tuning of any models, occupying minimal VRAM, easy to deploy, and highly scalable; we provide a flexible code library with various search and generation strategies, facilitating custom process implementation. The last one is efficient inference. We designed an efficient inference acceleration scheme for the entire coarse ranking, reranking, and generation process that significantly reduces the inference latency of RAG while maintaining a good level of accuracy; each acceleration scheme can be plug-and-play into any component of the RAG process, consistently enhancing the efficiency of the RAG system. Our code and data are released at https://github.com/BUAADreamer/EasyRAG.

Graph mining workloads aim to extract structural properties of a graph by exploring its subgraph structures. General purpose graph mining systems provide a generic runtime to explore subgraph structures of interest with the help of user-defined functions that guide the overall exploration process. However, the state-of-the-art graph mining systems remain largely oblivious to the shape (or pattern) of the subgraphs that they mine. This causes them to: (a) explore unnecessary subgraphs; (b) perform expensive computations on the explored subgraphs; and, (c) hold intermediate partial subgraphs in memory; all of which affect their overall performance. Furthermore, their programming models are often tied to their underlying exploration strategies, which makes it difficult for domain users to express complex mining tasks. In this paper, we develop Peregrine, a pattern-aware graph mining system that directly explores the subgraphs of interest while avoiding exploration of unnecessary subgraphs, and simultaneously bypassing expensive computations throughout the mining process. We design a pattern-based programming model that treats "graph patterns" as first class constructs and enables Peregrine to extract the semantics of patterns, which it uses to guide its exploration. Our evaluation shows that Peregrine outperforms state-of-the-art distributed and single machine graph mining systems, and scales to complex mining tasks on larger graphs, while retaining simplicity and expressivity with its "pattern-first" programming approach.

The rapid propagation of misinformation poses substantial risks to public interest. To combat misinformation, large language models (LLMs) are adapted to automatically verify claim credibility. Nevertheless, existing methods heavily rely on the embedded knowledge within LLMs and / or black-box APIs for evidence collection, leading to subpar performance with smaller LLMs or upon unreliable context. In this paper, we propose retrieval augmented fact verification through the synthesis of contrasting arguments (RAFTS). Upon input claims, RAFTS starts with evidence retrieval, where we design a retrieval pipeline to collect and re-rank relevant documents from verifiable sources. Then, RAFTS forms contrastive arguments (i.e., supporting or refuting) conditioned on the retrieved evidence. In addition, RAFTS leverages an embedding model to identify informative demonstrations, followed by in-context prompting to generate the prediction and explanation. Our method effectively retrieves relevant documents as evidence and evaluates arguments from varying perspectives, incorporating nuanced information for fine-grained decision-making. Combined with informative in-context examples as prior, RAFTS achieves significant improvements to supervised and LLM baselines without complex prompts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments, where RAFTS can outperform GPT-based methods with a significantly smaller 7B LLM.

Despite the significant advancements in keyphrase extraction and keyphrase generation methods, the predominant approach for evaluation only relies on exact matching with human references and disregards reference-free attributes. This scheme fails to recognize systems that generate keyphrases that are semantically equivalent to the references or keyphrases that have practical utility. To better understand the strengths and weaknesses of different keyphrase systems, we propose a comprehensive evaluation framework consisting of six critical dimensions: naturalness, faithfulness, saliency, coverage, diversity, and utility. For each dimension, we discuss the desiderata and design semantic-based metrics that align with the evaluation objectives. Rigorous meta-evaluation studies demonstrate that our evaluation strategy correlates better with human preferences compared to a range of previously used metrics. Using this framework, we re-evaluate 18 keyphrase systems and further discover that (1) the best model differs in different dimensions, with pre-trained language models achieving the best in most dimensions; (2) the utility in downstream tasks does not always correlate well with reference-based metrics; and (3) large language models exhibit a strong performance in reference-free evaluation.

Recent studies demonstrate that query expansions generated by large language models (LLMs) can considerably enhance information retrieval systems by generating hypothetical documents that answer the queries as expansions. However, challenges arise from misalignments between the expansions and the retrieval corpus, resulting in issues like hallucinations and outdated information due to the limited intrinsic knowledge of LLMs. Inspired by Pseudo Relevance Feedback (PRF), we introduce Corpus-Steered Query Expansion (CSQE) to promote the incorporation of knowledge embedded within the corpus. CSQE utilizes the relevance assessing capability of LLMs to systematically identify pivotal sentences in the initially-retrieved documents. These corpus-originated texts are subsequently used to expand the query together with LLM-knowledge empowered expansions, improving the relevance prediction between the query and the target documents. Extensive experiments reveal that CSQE exhibits strong performance without necessitating any training, especially with queries for which LLMs lack knowledge.

Pairing a lexical retriever with a neural re-ranking model has set state-of-the-art performance on large-scale information retrieval datasets. This pipeline covers scenarios like question answering or navigational queries, however, for information-seeking scenarios, users often provide information on whether a document is relevant to their query in form of clicks or explicit feedback. Therefore, in this work, we explore how relevance feedback can be directly integrated into neural re-ranking models by adopting few-shot and parameter-efficient learning techniques. Specifically, we introduce a kNN approach that re-ranks documents based on their similarity with the query and the documents the user considers relevant. Further, we explore Cross-Encoder models that we pre-train using meta-learning and subsequently fine-tune for each query, training only on the feedback documents. To evaluate our different integration strategies, we transform four existing information retrieval datasets into the relevance feedback scenario. Extensive experiments demonstrate that integrating relevance feedback directly in neural re-ranking models improves their performance, and fusing lexical ranking with our best performing neural re-ranker outperforms all other methods by 5.2 nDCG@20.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for a sentence-level answer-selection task that is a fundamental problem in natural language processing. First, we explore the effect of additional information by adopting a pretrained language model to compute the vector representation of the input text and by applying transfer learning from a large-scale corpus. Second, we enhance the compare-aggregate model by proposing a novel latent clustering method to compute additional information within the target corpus and by changing the objective function from listwise to pointwise. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches, experiments are performed with the WikiQA and TREC-QA datasets. The empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach, which achieve state-of-the-art performance for both datasets.

Did you try out the new Bing Search? Or maybe you fiddled around with Google AI~Overviews? These might sound familiar because the modern-day search stack has recently evolved to include retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. They allow searching and incorporating real-time data into large language models (LLMs) to provide a well-informed, attributed, concise summary in contrast to the traditional search paradigm that relies on displaying a ranked list of documents. Therefore, given these recent advancements, it is crucial to have an arena to build, test, visualize, and systematically evaluate RAG-based search systems. With this in mind, we propose the TREC 2024 RAG Track to foster innovation in evaluating RAG systems. In our work, we lay out the steps we've made towards making this track a reality -- we describe the details of our reusable framework, Ragnar\"ok, explain the curation of the new MS MARCO V2.1 collection choice, release the development topics for the track, and standardize the I/O definitions which assist the end user. Next, using Ragnar\"ok, we identify and provide key industrial baselines such as OpenAI's GPT-4o or Cohere's Command R+. Further, we introduce a web-based user interface for an interactive arena allowing benchmarking pairwise RAG systems by crowdsourcing. We open-source our Ragnar\"ok framework and baselines to achieve a unified standard for future RAG systems.

Formulating selective information needs results in queries that implicitly specify set operations, such as intersection, union, and difference. For instance, one might search for "shorebirds that are not sandpipers" or "science-fiction films shot in England". To study the ability of retrieval systems to meet such information needs, we construct QUEST, a dataset of 3357 natural language queries with implicit set operations, that map to a set of entities corresponding to Wikipedia documents. The dataset challenges models to match multiple constraints mentioned in queries with corresponding evidence in documents and correctly perform various set operations. The dataset is constructed semi-automatically using Wikipedia category names. Queries are automatically composed from individual categories, then paraphrased and further validated for naturalness and fluency by crowdworkers. Crowdworkers also assess the relevance of entities based on their documents and highlight attribution of query constraints to spans of document text. We analyze several modern retrieval systems, finding that they often struggle on such queries. Queries involving negation and conjunction are particularly challenging and systems are further challenged with combinations of these operations.

As the academic landscape expands, the challenge of efficiently identifying potentially high-impact articles among the vast number of newly published works becomes critical. This paper introduces a promising approach, leveraging the capabilities of fine-tuned LLMs to predict the future impact of newborn articles solely based on titles and abstracts. Moving beyond traditional methods heavily reliant on external information, the proposed method discerns the shared semantic features of highly impactful papers from a large collection of title-abstract and potential impact pairs. These semantic features are further utilized to regress an improved metric, TNCSI_SP, which has been endowed with value, field, and time normalization properties. Additionally, a comprehensive dataset has been constructed and released for fine-tuning the LLM, containing over 12,000 entries with corresponding titles, abstracts, and TNCSI_SP. The quantitative results, with an NDCG@20 of 0.901, demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in predicting the impact of newborn articles when compared to competitive counterparts. Finally, we demonstrate a real-world application for predicting the impact of newborn journal articles to demonstrate its noteworthy practical value. Overall, our findings challenge existing paradigms and propose a shift towards a more content-focused prediction of academic impact, offering new insights for assessing newborn article impact.

In this study, we propose a novel graph neural network called propagate-selector (PS), which propagates information over sentences to understand information that cannot be inferred when considering sentences in isolation. First, we design a graph structure in which each node represents an individual sentence, and some pairs of nodes are selectively connected based on the text structure. Then, we develop an iterative attentive aggregation and a skip-combine method in which a node interacts with its neighborhood nodes to accumulate the necessary information. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches, we conduct experiments with the standard HotpotQA dataset. The empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach, which obtains the best performances, compared to the widely used answer-selection models that do not consider the intersentential relationship.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) demonstrates remarkable performance across tasks in open-domain question-answering. However, traditional search engines may retrieve shallow content, limiting the ability of LLMs to handle complex, multi-layered information. To address it, we introduce WebWalkerQA, a benchmark designed to assess the ability of LLMs to perform web traversal. It evaluates the capacity of LLMs to traverse a website's subpages to extract high-quality data systematically. We propose WebWalker, which is a multi-agent framework that mimics human-like web navigation through an explore-critic paradigm. Extensive experimental results show that WebWalkerQA is challenging and demonstrates the effectiveness of RAG combined with WebWalker, through the horizontal and vertical integration in real-world scenarios.

Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has produced models that exhibit remarkable performance across a variety of NLP tasks. However, it remains unclear whether the existing focus of NLP research accurately captures the genuine requirements of human users. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the divergence between current NLP research and the needs of real-world NLP applications via a large-scale collection of user-GPT conversations. We analyze a large-scale collection of real user queries to GPT. We compare these queries against existing NLP benchmark tasks and identify a significant gap between the tasks that users frequently request from LLMs and the tasks that are commonly studied in academic research. For example, we find that tasks such as ``design'' and ``planning'' are prevalent in user interactions but are largely neglected or different from traditional NLP benchmarks. We investigate these overlooked tasks, dissect the practical challenges they pose, and provide insights toward a roadmap to make LLMs better aligned with user needs.

Although large language models (LLMs) are impressive in solving various tasks, they can quickly be outdated after deployment. Maintaining their up-to-date status is a pressing concern in the current era. This paper provides a comprehensive review of recent advances in aligning LLMs with the ever-changing world knowledge without re-training from scratch. We categorize research works systemically and provide in-depth comparisons and discussion. We also discuss existing challenges and highlight future directions to facilitate research in this field. We release the paper list at https://github.com/hyintell/awesome-refreshing-llms

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly employed for complex multi-step planning tasks, where the tool retrieval (TR) step is crucial for achieving successful outcomes. Two prevalent approaches for TR are single-step retrieval, which utilizes the complete query, and sequential retrieval using task decomposition (TD), where a full query is segmented into discrete atomic subtasks. While single-step retrieval lacks the flexibility to handle "inter-tool dependency," the TD approach necessitates maintaining "subtask-tool atomicity alignment," as the toolbox can evolve dynamically. To address these limitations, we introduce the Progressive Tool retrieval to Improve Planning (ProTIP) framework. ProTIP is a lightweight, contrastive learning-based framework that implicitly performs TD without the explicit requirement of subtask labels, while simultaneously maintaining subtask-tool atomicity. On the ToolBench dataset, ProTIP outperforms the ChatGPT task decomposition-based approach by a remarkable margin, achieving a 24% improvement in Recall@K=10 for TR and a 41% enhancement in tool accuracy for plan generation.

Peer review, as a cornerstone of scientific research, ensures the integrity and quality of scholarly work by providing authors with objective feedback for refinement. However, in the traditional peer review process, authors often receive vague or insufficiently detailed feedback, which provides limited assistance and leads to a more time-consuming review cycle. If authors can identify some specific weaknesses in their paper, they can not only address the reviewer's concerns but also improve their work. This raises the critical question of how to enhance authors' comprehension of review comments. In this paper, we present SEAGraph, a novel framework developed to clarify review comments by uncovering the underlying intentions behind them. We construct two types of graphs for each paper: the semantic mind graph, which captures the author's thought process, and the hierarchical background graph, which delineates the research domains related to the paper. A retrieval method is then designed to extract relevant content from both graphs, facilitating coherent explanations for the review comments. Extensive experiments show that SEAGraph excels in review comment understanding tasks, offering significant benefits to authors.

Two-step approaches, in which summary candidates are generated-then-reranked to return a single summary, can improve ROUGE scores over the standard single-step approach. Yet, standard decoding methods (i.e., beam search, nucleus sampling, and diverse beam search) produce candidates with redundant, and often low quality, content. In this paper, we design a novel method to generate candidates for re-ranking that addresses these issues. We ground each candidate abstract on its own unique content plan and generate distinct plan-guided abstracts using a model's top beam. More concretely, a standard language model (a BART LM) auto-regressively generates elemental discourse unit (EDU) content plans with an extractive copy mechanism. The top K beams from the content plan generator are then used to guide a separate LM, which produces a single abstractive candidate for each distinct plan. We apply an existing re-ranker (BRIO) to abstractive candidates generated from our method, as well as baseline decoding methods. We show large relevance improvements over previously published methods on widely used single document news article corpora, with ROUGE-2 F1 gains of 0.88, 2.01, and 0.38 on CNN / Dailymail, NYT, and Xsum, respectively. A human evaluation on CNN / DM validates these results. Similarly, on 1k samples from CNN / DM, we show that prompting GPT-3 to follow EDU plans outperforms sampling-based methods by 1.05 ROUGE-2 F1 points. Code to generate and realize plans is available at https://github.com/griff4692/edu-sum.

In recent years, short Text Matching tasks have been widely applied in the fields ofadvertising search and recommendation. The difficulty lies in the lack of semantic information and word ambiguity caused by the short length of the text. Previous works have introduced complement sentences or knowledge bases to provide additional feature information. However, these methods have not fully interacted between the original sentence and the complement sentence, and have not considered the noise issue that may arise from the introduction of external knowledge bases. Therefore, this paper proposes a short Text Matching model that combines contrastive learning and external knowledge. The model uses a generative model to generate corresponding complement sentences and uses the contrastive learning method to guide the model to obtain more semantically meaningful encoding of the original sentence. In addition, to avoid noise, we use keywords as the main semantics of the original sentence to retrieve corresponding knowledge words in the knowledge base, and construct a knowledge graph. The graph encoding model is used to integrate the knowledge base information into the model. Our designed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two publicly available Chinese Text Matching datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model.

Candidate generation is the first stage in recommendation systems, where a light-weight system is used to retrieve potentially relevant items for an input user. These candidate items are then ranked and pruned in later stages of recommender systems using a more complex ranking model. Since candidate generation is the top of the recommendation funnel, it is important to retrieve a high-recall candidate set to feed into downstream ranking models. A common approach for candidate generation is to leverage approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search from a single dense query embedding; however, this approach this can yield a low-diversity result set with many near duplicates. As users often have multiple interests, candidate retrieval should ideally return a diverse set of candidates reflective of the user's multiple interests. To this end, we introduce kNN-Embed, a general approach to improving diversity in dense ANN-based retrieval. kNN-Embed represents each user as a smoothed mixture over learned item clusters that represent distinct `interests' of the user. By querying each of a user's mixture component in proportion to their mixture weights, we retrieve a high-diversity set of candidates reflecting elements from each of a user's interests. We experimentally compare kNN-Embed to standard ANN candidate retrieval, and show significant improvements in overall recall and improved diversity across three datasets. Accompanying this work, we open source a large Twitter follow-graph dataset, to spur further research in graph-mining and representation learning for recommender systems.

We introduce TeleQnA, the first benchmark dataset designed to evaluate the knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) in telecommunications. Comprising 10,000 questions and answers, this dataset draws from diverse sources, including standards and research articles. This paper outlines the automated question generation framework responsible for creating this dataset, along with how human input was integrated at various stages to ensure the quality of the questions. Afterwards, using the provided dataset, an evaluation is conducted to assess the capabilities of LLMs, including GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. The results highlight that these models struggle with complex standards related questions but exhibit proficiency in addressing general telecom-related inquiries. Additionally, our results showcase how incorporating telecom knowledge context significantly enhances their performance, thus shedding light on the need for a specialized telecom foundation model. Finally, the dataset is shared with active telecom professionals, whose performance is subsequently benchmarked against that of the LLMs. The findings illustrate that LLMs can rival the performance of active professionals in telecom knowledge, thanks to their capacity to process vast amounts of information, underscoring the potential of LLMs within this domain. The dataset has been made publicly accessible on GitHub.

One technique to improve the retrieval effectiveness of a search engine is to expand documents with terms that are related or representative of the documents' content.From the perspective of a question answering system, this might comprise questions the document can potentially answer. Following this observation, we propose a simple method that predicts which queries will be issued for a given document and then expands it with those predictions with a vanilla sequence-to-sequence model, trained using datasets consisting of pairs of query and relevant documents. By combining our method with a highly-effective re-ranking component, we achieve the state of the art in two retrieval tasks. In a latency-critical regime, retrieval results alone (without re-ranking) approach the effectiveness of more computationally expensive neural re-rankers but are much faster.

Wikipedia is an important free source of intelligible knowledge. Despite that, Brazilian Portuguese Wikipedia still lacks descriptions for many subjects. In an effort to expand the Brazilian Wikipedia, we contribute PLSum, a framework for generating wiki-like abstractive summaries from multiple descriptive websites. The framework has an extractive stage followed by an abstractive one. In particular, for the abstractive stage, we fine-tune and compare two recent variations of the Transformer neural network, PTT5, and Longformer. To fine-tune and evaluate the model, we created a dataset with thousands of examples, linking reference websites to Wikipedia. Our results show that it is possible to generate meaningful abstractive summaries from Brazilian Portuguese web content.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive versatility across various tasks. To eliminate its hallucinations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful approach, leveraging external knowledge sources like knowledge graphs (KGs). In this paper, we study the task of KG-driven RAG and propose a novel Similar Graph Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (SimGRAG) method. It effectively addresses the challenge of aligning query texts and KG structures through a two-stage process: (1) query-to-pattern, which uses an LLM to transform queries into a desired graph pattern, and (2) pattern-to-subgraph, which quantifies the alignment between the pattern and candidate subgraphs using a graph semantic distance (GSD) metric. We also develop an optimized retrieval algorithm that efficiently identifies the top-k subgraphs within 1-second latency on a 10-million-scale KG. Extensive experiments show that SimGRAG outperforms state-of-the-art KG-driven RAG methods in both question answering and fact verification, offering superior plug-and-play usability and scalability.

Answering real-world user queries, such as product search, often requires accurate retrieval of information from semi-structured knowledge bases or databases that involve blend of unstructured (e.g., textual descriptions of products) and structured (e.g., entity relations of products) information. However, previous works have mostly studied textual and relational retrieval tasks as separate topics. To address the gap, we develop STARK, a large-scale Semi-structure retrieval benchmark on Textual and Relational Knowledge Bases. We design a novel pipeline to synthesize natural and realistic user queries that integrate diverse relational information and complex textual properties, as well as their ground-truth answers. Moreover, we rigorously conduct human evaluation to validate the quality of our benchmark, which covers a variety of practical applications, including product recommendations, academic paper searches, and precision medicine inquiries. Our benchmark serves as a comprehensive testbed for evaluating the performance of retrieval systems, with an emphasis on retrieval approaches driven by large language models (LLMs). Our experiments suggest that the STARK datasets present significant challenges to the current retrieval and LLM systems, indicating the demand for building more capable retrieval systems that can handle both textual and relational aspects.

When experiencing an information need, users want to engage with a domain expert, but often turn to an information retrieval system, such as a search engine, instead. Classical information retrieval systems do not answer information needs directly, but instead provide references to (hopefully authoritative) answers. Successful question answering systems offer a limited corpus created on-demand by human experts, which is neither timely nor scalable. Pre-trained language models, by contrast, are capable of directly generating prose that may be responsive to an information need, but at present they are dilettantes rather than domain experts -- they do not have a true understanding of the world, they are prone to hallucinating, and crucially they are incapable of justifying their utterances by referring to supporting documents in the corpus they were trained over. This paper examines how ideas from classical information retrieval and pre-trained language models can be synthesized and evolved into systems that truly deliver on the promise of domain expert advice.

Rationale discovery is defined as finding a subset of the input data that maximally supports the prediction of downstream tasks. In graph machine learning context, graph rationale is defined to locate the critical subgraph in the given graph topology, which fundamentally determines the prediction results. In contrast to the rationale subgraph, the remaining subgraph is named the environment subgraph. Graph rationalization can enhance the model performance as the mapping between the graph rationale and prediction label is viewed as invariant, by assumption. To ensure the discriminative power of the extracted rationale subgraphs, a key technique named "intervention" is applied. The core idea of intervention is that given any changing environment subgraphs, the semantics from the rationale subgraph is invariant, which guarantees the correct prediction result. However, most, if not all, of the existing rationalization works on graph data develop their intervention strategies on the graph level, which is coarse-grained. In this paper, we propose well-tailored intervention strategies on graph data. Our idea is driven by the development of Transformer models, whose self-attention module provides rich interactions between input nodes. Based on the self-attention module, our proposed invariant graph Transformer (IGT) can achieve fine-grained, more specifically, node-level and virtual node-level intervention. Our comprehensive experiments involve 7 real-world datasets, and the proposed IGT shows significant performance advantages compared to 13 baseline methods.

We present BYOKG, a universal question-answering (QA) system that can operate on any knowledge graph (KG), requires no human-annotated training data, and can be ready to use within a day -- attributes that are out-of-scope for current KGQA systems. BYOKG draws inspiration from the remarkable ability of humans to comprehend information present in an unseen KG through exploration -- starting at random nodes, inspecting the labels of adjacent nodes and edges, and combining them with their prior world knowledge. In BYOKG, exploration leverages an LLM-backed symbolic agent that generates a diverse set of query-program exemplars, which are then used to ground a retrieval-augmented reasoning procedure to predict programs for arbitrary questions. BYOKG is effective over both small- and large-scale graphs, showing dramatic gains in QA accuracy over a zero-shot baseline of 27.89 and 58.02 F1 on GrailQA and MetaQA, respectively. On GrailQA, we further show that our unsupervised BYOKG outperforms a supervised in-context learning method, demonstrating the effectiveness of exploration. Lastly, we find that performance of BYOKG reliably improves with continued exploration as well as improvements in the base LLM, notably outperforming a state-of-the-art fine-tuned model by 7.08 F1 on a sub-sampled zero-shot split of GrailQA.

We propose a filtering feature selection framework that considers subsets of features as paths in a graph, where a node is a feature and an edge indicates pairwise (customizable) relations among features, dealing with relevance and redundancy principles. By two different interpretations (exploiting properties of power series of matrices and relying on Markov chains fundamentals) we can evaluate the values of paths (i.e., feature subsets) of arbitrary lengths, eventually go to infinite, from which we dub our framework Infinite Feature Selection (Inf-FS). Going to infinite allows to constrain the computational complexity of the selection process, and to rank the features in an elegant way, that is, considering the value of any path (subset) containing a particular feature. We also propose a simple unsupervised strategy to cut the ranking, so providing the subset of features to keep. In the experiments, we analyze diverse settings with heterogeneous features, for a total of 11 benchmarks, comparing against 18 widely-known comparative approaches. The results show that Inf-FS behaves better in almost any situation, that is, when the number of features to keep are fixed a priori, or when the decision of the subset cardinality is part of the process.

We study the problem of retrieval with instructions, where users of a retrieval system explicitly describe their intent along with their queries. We aim to develop a general-purpose task-aware retrieval system using multi-task instruction tuning, which can follow human-written instructions to find the best documents for a given query. We introduce the first large-scale collection of approximately 40 retrieval datasets with instructions, BERRI, and present TART, a multi-task retrieval system trained on BERRI with instructions. TART shows strong capabilities to adapt to a new retrieval task via instructions and advances the state of the art on two zero-shot retrieval benchmarks, BEIR and LOTTE, outperforming models up to three times larger. We further introduce a new evaluation setup, X^2-Retrieval to better reflect real-world scenarios, where diverse domains and tasks are pooled and a system needs to find documents aligning users' intents. In this setup, TART significantly outperforms competitive baselines, further demonstrating the effectiveness of guiding retrieval with instructions.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled autonomous agents with complex reasoning and task-fulfillment capabilities using a wide range of tools. However, effectively identifying the most relevant tools for a given task becomes a key bottleneck as the toolset size grows, hindering reliable tool utilization. To address this, we introduce Re-Invoke, an unsupervised tool retrieval method designed to scale effectively to large toolsets without training. Specifically, we first generate a diverse set of synthetic queries that comprehensively cover different aspects of the query space associated with each tool document during the tool indexing phase. Second, we leverage LLM's query understanding capabilities to extract key tool-related context and underlying intents from user queries during the inference phase. Finally, we employ a novel multi-view similarity ranking strategy based on intents to pinpoint the most relevant tools for each query. Our evaluation demonstrates that Re-Invoke significantly outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives in both single-tool and multi-tool scenarios, all within a fully unsupervised setting. Notably, on the ToolE datasets, we achieve a 20% relative improvement in nDCG@5 for single-tool retrieval and a 39% improvement for multi-tool retrieval.

Retrieval-augmented language models are being increasingly tasked with subjective, contentious, and conflicting queries such as "is aspartame linked to cancer". To resolve these ambiguous queries, one must search through a large range of websites and consider "which, if any, of this evidence do I find convincing?". In this work, we study how LLMs answer this question. In particular, we construct ConflictingQA, a dataset that pairs controversial queries with a series of real-world evidence documents that contain different facts (e.g., quantitative results), argument styles (e.g., appeals to authority), and answers (Yes or No). We use this dataset to perform sensitivity and counterfactual analyses to explore which text features most affect LLM predictions. Overall, we find that current models rely heavily on the relevance of a website to the query, while largely ignoring stylistic features that humans find important such as whether a text contains scientific references or is written with a neutral tone. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of RAG corpus quality (e.g., the need to filter misinformation), and possibly even a shift in how LLMs are trained to better align with human judgements.

Clickbait posts are a widespread problem in the webspace. The generation of spoilers, i.e. short texts that neutralize clickbait by providing information that satisfies the curiosity induced by it, is one of the proposed solutions to the problem. Current state-of-the-art methods are based on passage retrieval or question answering approaches and are limited to generating spoilers only in the form of a phrase or a passage. In this work, we propose an ensemble of fine-tuned large language models for clickbait spoiler generation. Our approach is not limited to phrase or passage spoilers, but is also able to generate multipart spoilers that refer to several non-consecutive parts of text. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed ensemble model outperforms the baselines in terms of BLEU, METEOR and BERTScore metrics.

While language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a range of tasks, they still struggle with tasks that require complex planning and reasoning. Recent studies have proposed training language models on search processes rather than optimal solutions, resulting in better generalization performance even though search processes are noisy and even suboptimal. However, these studies overlook the value of optimal solutions, which can serve as step-by-step landmarks to guide more effective search. In this work, we explore how to leverage optimal solutions to enhance the search and planning abilities of language models. To this end, we propose guided stream of search (GSoS), which seamlessly incorporates optimal solutions into the self-generation process in a progressive manner, producing high-quality search trajectories. These trajectories are then distilled into the pre-trained model via supervised fine-tuning. Our approach significantly enhances the search and planning abilities of language models on Countdown, a simple yet challenging mathematical reasoning task. Notably, combining our method with RL fine-tuning yields further improvements, whereas previous supervised fine-tuning methods do not benefit from RL. Furthermore, our approach exhibits greater effectiveness than leveraging optimal solutions in the form of subgoal rewards.

In the continuously advancing AI landscape, crafting context-rich and meaningful responses via Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential. Researchers are becoming more aware of the challenges that LLMs with fewer parameters encounter when trying to provide suitable answers to open-ended questions. To address these hurdles, the integration of cutting-edge strategies, augmentation of rich external domain knowledge to LLMs, offers significant improvements. This paper introduces a novel framework that combines graph-driven context retrieval in conjunction to knowledge graphs based enhancement, honing the proficiency of LLMs, especially in domain specific community question answering platforms like AskUbuntu, Unix, and ServerFault. We conduct experiments on various LLMs with different parameter sizes to evaluate their ability to ground knowledge and determine factual accuracy in answers to open-ended questions. Our methodology GraphContextGen consistently outperforms dominant text-based retrieval systems, demonstrating its robustness and adaptability to a larger number of use cases. This advancement highlights the importance of pairing context rich data retrieval with LLMs, offering a renewed approach to knowledge sourcing and generation in AI systems. We also show that, due to rich contextual data retrieval, the crucial entities, along with the generated answer, remain factually coherent with the gold answer.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating multiple responses to a single prompt, yet little effort has been expended to help end-users or system designers make use of this capability. In this paper, we explore how to present many LLM responses at once. We design five features, which include both pre-existing and novel methods for computing similarities and differences across textual documents, as well as how to render their outputs. We report on a controlled user study (n=24) and eight case studies evaluating these features and how they support users in different tasks. We find that the features support a wide variety of sensemaking tasks and even make tasks previously considered to be too difficult by our participants now tractable. Finally, we present design guidelines to inform future explorations of new LLM interfaces.

Prior work in Argument Mining frequently alludes to its potential applications in automatic debating systems. Despite this focus, almost no datasets or models exist which apply natural language processing techniques to problems found within competitive formal debate. To remedy this, we present the DebateSum dataset. DebateSum consists of 187,386 unique pieces of evidence with corresponding argument and extractive summaries. DebateSum was made using data compiled by competitors within the National Speech and Debate Association over a 7-year period. We train several transformer summarization models to benchmark summarization performance on DebateSum. We also introduce a set of fasttext word-vectors trained on DebateSum called debate2vec. Finally, we present a search engine for this dataset which is utilized extensively by members of the National Speech and Debate Association today. The DebateSum search engine is available to the public here: http://www.debate.cards

As we embark on a new era of LLMs, it becomes increasingly crucial to understand their capabilities, limitations, and differences. Toward making further progress in this direction, we strive to build a deeper understanding of the gaps between massive LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) and smaller yet effective open-source LLMs and their distilled counterparts. To this end, we specifically focus on long-form question answering (LFQA) because it has several practical and impactful applications (e.g., troubleshooting, customer service, etc.) yet is still understudied and challenging for LLMs. We propose a question-generation method from abstractive summaries and show that generating follow-up questions from summaries of long documents can create a challenging setting for LLMs to reason and infer from long contexts. Our experimental results confirm that: (1) our proposed method of generating questions from abstractive summaries pose a challenging setup for LLMs and shows performance gaps between LLMs like ChatGPT and open-source LLMs (Alpaca, Llama) (2) open-source LLMs exhibit decreased reliance on context for generated questions from the original document, but their generation capabilities drop significantly on generated questions from summaries -- especially for longer contexts (>1024 tokens)

Many recent approaches towards neural information retrieval mitigate their computational costs by using a multi-stage ranking pipeline. In the first stage, a number of potentially relevant candidates are retrieved using an efficient retrieval model such as BM25. Although BM25 has proven decent performance as a first-stage ranker, it tends to miss relevant passages. In this context we propose CoRT, a simple neural first-stage ranking model that leverages contextual representations from pretrained language models such as BERT to complement term-based ranking functions while causing no significant delay at query time. Using the MS MARCO dataset, we show that CoRT significantly increases the candidate recall by complementing BM25 with missing candidates. Consequently, we find subsequent re-rankers achieve superior results with less candidates. We further demonstrate that passage retrieval using CoRT can be realized with surprisingly low latencies.

We investigate the potential of GPT-4~gpt4 to perform Neural Architecture Search (NAS) -- the task of designing effective neural architectures. Our proposed approach, GPT-4 Enhanced Neural archItectUre Search (GENIUS), leverages the generative capabilities of GPT-4 as a black-box optimiser to quickly navigate the architecture search space, pinpoint promising candidates, and iteratively refine these candidates to improve performance. We assess GENIUS across several benchmarks, comparing it with existing state-of-the-art NAS techniques to illustrate its effectiveness. Rather than targeting state-of-the-art performance, our objective is to highlight GPT-4's potential to assist research on a challenging technical problem through a simple prompting scheme that requires relatively limited domain expertiseCode available at \href{https://github.com/mingkai-zheng/GENIUS{https://github.com/mingkai-zheng/GENIUS}.}. More broadly, we believe our preliminary results point to future research that harnesses general purpose language models for diverse optimisation tasks. We also highlight important limitations to our study, and note implications for AI safety.

We study the problem of interpreting trained classification models in the setting of linguistic data sets. Leveraging a parse tree, we propose to assign least-squares based importance scores to each word of an instance by exploiting syntactic constituency structure. We establish an axiomatic characterization of these importance scores by relating them to the Banzhaf value in coalitional game theory. Based on these importance scores, we develop a principled method for detecting and quantifying interactions between words in a sentence. We demonstrate that the proposed method can aid in interpretability and diagnostics for several widely-used language models.

We propose KnowGL, a tool that allows converting text into structured relational data represented as a set of ABox assertions compliant with the TBox of a given Knowledge Graph (KG), such as Wikidata. We address this problem as a sequence generation task by leveraging pre-trained sequence-to-sequence language models, e.g. BART. Given a sentence, we fine-tune such models to detect pairs of entity mentions and jointly generate a set of facts consisting of the full set of semantic annotations for a KG, such as entity labels, entity types, and their relationships. To showcase the capabilities of our tool, we build a web application consisting of a set of UI widgets that help users to navigate through the semantic data extracted from a given input text. We make the KnowGL model available at https://huggingface.co/ibm/knowgl-large.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) represent human-crafted factual knowledge in the form of triplets (head, relation, tail), which collectively form a graph. Question Answering over KGs (KGQA) is the task of answering natural questions grounding the reasoning to the information provided by the KG. Large Language Models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models for QA tasks due to their remarkable ability to understand natural language. On the other hand, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely used for KGQA as they can handle the complex graph information stored in the KG. In this work, we introduce GNN-RAG, a novel method for combining language understanding abilities of LLMs with the reasoning abilities of GNNs in a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) style. First, a GNN reasons over a dense KG subgraph to retrieve answer candidates for a given question. Second, the shortest paths in the KG that connect question entities and answer candidates are extracted to represent KG reasoning paths. The extracted paths are verbalized and given as input for LLM reasoning with RAG. In our GNN-RAG framework, the GNN acts as a dense subgraph reasoner to extract useful graph information, while the LLM leverages its natural language processing ability for ultimate KGQA. Furthermore, we develop a retrieval augmentation (RA) technique to further boost KGQA performance with GNN-RAG. Experimental results show that GNN-RAG achieves state-of-the-art performance in two widely used KGQA benchmarks (WebQSP and CWQ), outperforming or matching GPT-4 performance with a 7B tuned LLM. In addition, GNN-RAG excels on multi-hop and multi-entity questions outperforming competing approaches by 8.9--15.5% points at answer F1.

Growing interests have been attracted in Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS), which explore user preference through conversational interactions in order to make appropriate recommendation. However, there is still a lack of ability in existing CRS to (1) traverse multiple reasoning paths over background knowledge to introduce relevant items and attributes, and (2) arrange selected entities appropriately under current system intents to control response generation. To address these issues, we propose CR-Walker in this paper, a model that performs tree-structured reasoning on a knowledge graph, and generates informative dialog acts to guide language generation. The unique scheme of tree-structured reasoning views the traversed entity at each hop as part of dialog acts to facilitate language generation, which links how entities are selected and expressed. Automatic and human evaluations show that CR-Walker can arrive at more accurate recommendation, and generate more informative and engaging responses.

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are trained on vast unlabeled data, rich in world knowledge. This fact has sparked the interest of the community in quantifying the amount of factual knowledge present in PLMs, as this explains their performance on downstream tasks, and potentially justifies their use as knowledge bases. In this work, we survey methods and datasets that are used to probe PLMs for factual knowledge. Our contributions are: (1) We propose a categorization scheme for factual probing methods that is based on how their inputs, outputs and the probed PLMs are adapted; (2) We provide an overview of the datasets used for factual probing; (3) We synthesize insights about knowledge retention and prompt optimization in PLMs, analyze obstacles to adopting PLMs as knowledge bases and outline directions for future work.

Generative retrieval has recently emerged as a new alternative of traditional information retrieval approaches. However, existing generative retrieval methods directly decode docid when a query is given, making it impossible to provide users with explanations as an answer for "Why this document is retrieved?". To address this limitation, we propose Hierarchical Category Path-Enhanced Generative Retrieval(HyPE), which enhances explainability by generating hierarchical category paths step-by-step before decoding docid. HyPE leverages hierarchical category paths as explanation, progressing from broad to specific semantic categories. This approach enables diverse explanations for the same document depending on the query by using shared category paths between the query and the document, and provides reasonable explanation by reflecting the document's semantic structure through a coarse-to-fine manner. HyPE constructs category paths with external high-quality semantic hierarchy, leverages LLM to select appropriate candidate paths for each document, and optimizes the generative retrieval model with path-augmented dataset. During inference, HyPE utilizes path-aware reranking strategy to aggregate diverse topic information, allowing the most relevant documents to be prioritized in the final ranked list of docids. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that HyPE not only offers a high level of explainability but also improves the retrieval performance in the document retrieval task.

Recently, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has achieved remarkable success in addressing the challenges of Large Language Models (LLMs) without necessitating retraining. By referencing an external knowledge base, RAG refines LLM outputs, effectively mitigating issues such as ``hallucination'', lack of domain-specific knowledge, and outdated information. However, the complex structure of relationships among different entities in databases presents challenges for RAG systems. In response, GraphRAG leverages structural information across entities to enable more precise and comprehensive retrieval, capturing relational knowledge and facilitating more accurate, context-aware responses. Given the novelty and potential of GraphRAG, a systematic review of current technologies is imperative. This paper provides the first comprehensive overview of GraphRAG methodologies. We formalize the GraphRAG workflow, encompassing Graph-Based Indexing, Graph-Guided Retrieval, and Graph-Enhanced Generation. We then outline the core technologies and training methods at each stage. Additionally, we examine downstream tasks, application domains, evaluation methodologies, and industrial use cases of GraphRAG. Finally, we explore future research directions to inspire further inquiries and advance progress in the field.

Identifying the intent of a citation in scientific papers (e.g., background information, use of methods, comparing results) is critical for machine reading of individual publications and automated analysis of the scientific literature. We propose structural scaffolds, a multitask model to incorporate structural information of scientific papers into citations for effective classification of citation intents. Our model achieves a new state-of-the-art on an existing ACL anthology dataset (ACL-ARC) with a 13.3% absolute increase in F1 score, without relying on external linguistic resources or hand-engineered features as done in existing methods. In addition, we introduce a new dataset of citation intents (SciCite) which is more than five times larger and covers multiple scientific domains compared with existing datasets. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/allenai/scicite.

When asked, current large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT claim that they can assist us with relevance judgments. Many researchers think this would not lead to credible IR research. In this perspective paper, we discuss possible ways for LLMs to assist human experts along with concerns and issues that arise. We devise a human-machine collaboration spectrum that allows categorizing different relevance judgment strategies, based on how much the human relies on the machine. For the extreme point of "fully automated assessment", we further include a pilot experiment on whether LLM-based relevance judgments correlate with judgments from trained human assessors. We conclude the paper by providing two opposing perspectives - for and against the use of LLMs for automatic relevance judgments - and a compromise perspective, informed by our analyses of the literature, our preliminary experimental evidence, and our experience as IR researchers. We hope to start a constructive discussion within the community to avoid a stale-mate during review, where work is dammed if is uses LLMs for evaluation and dammed if it doesn't.

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) for relevance assessments offers promising opportunities to improve Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and related fields. Indeed, LLMs hold the promise of allowing IR experimenters to build evaluation collections with a fraction of the manual human labor currently required. This could help with fresh topics on which there is still limited knowledge and could mitigate the challenges of evaluating ranking systems in low-resource scenarios, where it is challenging to find human annotators. Given the fast-paced recent developments in the domain, many questions concerning LLMs as assessors are yet to be answered. Among the aspects that require further investigation, we can list the impact of various components in a relevance judgment generation pipeline, such as the prompt used or the LLM chosen. This paper benchmarks and reports on the results of a large-scale automatic relevance judgment evaluation, the LLMJudge challenge at SIGIR 2024, where different relevance assessment approaches were proposed. In detail, we release and benchmark 42 LLM-generated labels of the TREC 2023 Deep Learning track relevance judgments produced by eight international teams who participated in the challenge. Given their diverse nature, these automatically generated relevance judgments can help the community not only investigate systematic biases caused by LLMs but also explore the effectiveness of ensemble models, analyze the trade-offs between different models and human assessors, and advance methodologies for improving automated evaluation techniques. The released resource is available at the following link: https://llm4eval.github.io/LLMJudge-benchmark/

With the release of ever more capable large language models (LLMs), researchers in NLP and related disciplines have started to explore the usability of LLMs for a wide variety of different annotation tasks. Very recently, a lot of this attention has shifted to tasks that are subjective in nature. Given that the latest generations of LLMs have digested and encoded extensive knowledge about different human subpopulations and individuals, the hope is that these models can be trained, tuned or prompted to align with a wide range of different human perspectives. While researchers already evaluate the success of this alignment via surveys and tests, there is a lack of resources to evaluate the alignment on what oftentimes matters the most in NLP; the actual downstream tasks. To fill this gap we present SubData, a Python library that offers researchers working on topics related to subjectivity in annotation tasks a convenient way of collecting, combining and using a range of suitable datasets.

While large language models (LMs) demonstrate remarkable performance, they encounter challenges in providing accurate responses when queried for information beyond their pre-trained memorization. Although augmenting them with relevant external information can mitigate these issues, failure to consider the necessity of retrieval may adversely affect overall performance. Previous research has primarily focused on examining how entities influence retrieval models and knowledge recall in LMs, leaving other aspects relatively unexplored. In this work, our goal is to offer a more detailed, fact-centric analysis by exploring the effects of combinations of entities and relations. To facilitate this, we construct a new question answering (QA) dataset called WiTQA (Wikipedia Triple Question Answers). This dataset includes questions about entities and relations of various popularity levels, each accompanied by a supporting passage. Our extensive experiments with diverse LMs and retrievers reveal when retrieval does not consistently enhance LMs from the viewpoints of fact-centric popularity.Confirming earlier findings, we observe that larger LMs excel in recalling popular facts. However, they notably encounter difficulty with infrequent entity-relation pairs compared to retrievers. Interestingly, they can effectively retain popular relations of less common entities. We demonstrate the efficacy of our finer-grained metric and insights through an adaptive retrieval system that selectively employs retrieval and recall based on the frequencies of entities and relations in the question.

We propose ParaSCI, the first large-scale paraphrase dataset in the scientific field, including 33,981 paraphrase pairs from ACL (ParaSCI-ACL) and 316,063 pairs from arXiv (ParaSCI-arXiv). Digging into characteristics and common patterns of scientific papers, we construct this dataset though intra-paper and inter-paper methods, such as collecting citations to the same paper or aggregating definitions by scientific terms. To take advantage of sentences paraphrased partially, we put up PDBERT as a general paraphrase discovering method. The major advantages of paraphrases in ParaSCI lie in the prominent length and textual diversity, which is complementary to existing paraphrase datasets. ParaSCI obtains satisfactory results on human evaluation and downstream tasks, especially long paraphrase generation.

Enhancing word usage is a desired feature for writing assistance. To further advance research in this area, this paper introduces "Smart Word Suggestions" (SWS) task and benchmark. Unlike other works, SWS emphasizes end-to-end evaluation and presents a more realistic writing assistance scenario. This task involves identifying words or phrases that require improvement and providing substitution suggestions. The benchmark includes human-labeled data for testing, a large distantly supervised dataset for training, and the framework for evaluation. The test data includes 1,000 sentences written by English learners, accompanied by over 16,000 substitution suggestions annotated by 10 native speakers. The training dataset comprises over 3.7 million sentences and 12.7 million suggestions generated through rules. Our experiments with seven baselines demonstrate that SWS is a challenging task. Based on experimental analysis, we suggest potential directions for future research on SWS. The dataset and related codes is available at https://github.com/microsoft/SmartWordSuggestions.

By leveraging the retrieval of information from external knowledge databases, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit enhanced capabilities for accomplishing many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, due to the inherent flaws of current retrieval systems, there might exist irrelevant information within those retrieving top-ranked passages. In this work, we present a comprehensive investigation into the robustness of LLMs to different types of irrelevant information under various conditions. We initially introduce a framework to construct high-quality irrelevant information that ranges from semantically unrelated, partially related, and related to questions. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that the constructed irrelevant information not only scores highly on similarity metrics, being highly retrieved by existing systems, but also bears semantic connections to the context. Our investigation reveals that current LLMs still face challenges in discriminating highly semantically related information and can be easily distracted by these irrelevant yet misleading contents. Besides, we also find that current solutions for handling irrelevant information have limitations in improving the robustness of LLMs to such distractions. Resources are available at https://github.com/Di-viner/LLM-Robustness-to-Irrelevant-Information.

In this paper, we introduce the BeaverTails dataset, aimed at fostering research on safety alignment in large language models (LLMs). This dataset uniquely separates annotations of helpfulness and harmlessness for question-answering pairs, thus offering distinct perspectives on these crucial attributes. In total, we have compiled safety meta-labels for 30,207 question-answer (QA) pairs and gathered 30,144 pairs of expert comparison data for both the helpfulness and harmlessness metrics. We further showcase applications of BeaverTails in content moderation and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), emphasizing its potential for practical safety measures in LLMs. We believe this dataset provides vital resources for the community, contributing towards the safe development and deployment of LLMs. Our project page is available at the following URL: https://sites.google.com/view/pku-beavertails.

Automatic summarization is the process of reducing a text document in order to generate a summary that retains the most important points of the original document. In this work, we study two problems - i) summarizing a text document as set of keywords/caption, for image recommedation, ii) generating opinion summary which good mix of relevancy and sentiment with the text document. Intially, we present our work on an recommending images for enhancing a substantial amount of existing plain text news articles. We use probabilistic models and word similarity heuristics to generate captions and extract Key-phrases which are re-ranked using a rank aggregation framework with relevance feedback mechanism. We show that such rank aggregation and relevant feedback which are typically used in Tagging Documents, Text Information Retrieval also helps in improving image retrieval. These queries are fed to the Yahoo Search Engine to obtain relevant images 1. Our proposed method is observed to perform better than all existing baselines. Additonally, We propose a set of submodular functions for opinion summarization. Opinion summarization has built in it the tasks of summarization and sentiment detection. However, it is not easy to detect sentiment and simultaneously extract summary. The two tasks conflict in the sense that the demand of compression may drop sentiment bearing sentences, and the demand of sentiment detection may bring in redundant sentences. However, using submodularity we show how to strike a balance between the two requirements. Our functions generate summaries such that there is good correlation between document sentiment and summary sentiment along with good ROUGE score. We also compare the performances of the proposed submodular functions.

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) has recently shown a potential to improve knowledge graph completion (KGC). However, most PLM-based methods focus solely on encoding textual information, neglecting the long-tailed nature of knowledge graphs and their various topological structures, e.g., subgraphs, shortest paths, and degrees. We claim that this is a major obstacle to achieving higher accuracy of PLMs for KGC. To this end, we propose a Subgraph-Aware Training framework for KGC (SATKGC) with two ideas: (i) subgraph-aware mini-batching to encourage hard negative sampling and to mitigate an imbalance in the frequency of entity occurrences during training, and (ii) new contrastive learning to focus more on harder in-batch negative triples and harder positive triples in terms of the structural properties of the knowledge graph. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to comprehensively incorporate the structural inductive bias of the knowledge graph into fine-tuning PLMs. Extensive experiments on three KGC benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of SATKGC. Our code is available.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based applications are graduating from research prototypes to products serving millions of users, influencing how people write and consume information. A prominent example is the appearance of Answer Engines: LLM-based generative search engines supplanting traditional search engines. Answer engines not only retrieve relevant sources to a user query but synthesize answer summaries that cite the sources. To understand these systems' limitations, we first conducted a study with 21 participants, evaluating interactions with answer vs. traditional search engines and identifying 16 answer engine limitations. From these insights, we propose 16 answer engine design recommendations, linked to 8 metrics. An automated evaluation implementing our metrics on three popular engines (You.com, Perplexity.ai, BingChat) quantifies common limitations (e.g., frequent hallucination, inaccurate citation) and unique features (e.g., variation in answer confidence), with results mirroring user study insights. We release our Answer Engine Evaluation benchmark (AEE) to facilitate transparent evaluation of LLM-based applications.

This paper introduces InstUPR, an unsupervised passage reranking method based on large language models (LLMs). Different from existing approaches that rely on extensive training with query-document pairs or retrieval-specific instructions, our method leverages the instruction-following capabilities of instruction-tuned LLMs for passage reranking without any additional fine-tuning. To achieve this, we introduce a soft score aggregation technique and employ pairwise reranking for unsupervised passage reranking. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark demonstrate that InstUPR outperforms unsupervised baselines as well as an instruction-tuned reranker, highlighting its effectiveness and superiority. Source code to reproduce all experiments is open-sourced at https://github.com/MiuLab/InstUPR

Generative models for open domain question answering have proven to be competitive, without resorting to external knowledge. While promising, this approach requires to use models with billions of parameters, which are expensive to train and query. In this paper, we investigate how much these models can benefit from retrieving text passages, potentially containing evidence. We obtain state-of-the-art results on the Natural Questions and TriviaQA open benchmarks. Interestingly, we observe that the performance of this method significantly improves when increasing the number of retrieved passages. This is evidence that generative models are good at aggregating and combining evidence from multiple passages.

Meetings are a key component of human collaboration. As increasing numbers of meetings are recorded and transcribed, meeting summaries have become essential to remind those who may or may not have attended the meetings about the key decisions made and the tasks to be completed. However, it is hard to create a single short summary that covers all the content of a long meeting involving multiple people and topics. In order to satisfy the needs of different types of users, we define a new query-based multi-domain meeting summarization task, where models have to select and summarize relevant spans of meetings in response to a query, and we introduce QMSum, a new benchmark for this task. QMSum consists of 1,808 query-summary pairs over 232 meetings in multiple domains. Besides, we investigate a locate-then-summarize method and evaluate a set of strong summarization baselines on the task. Experimental results and manual analysis reveal that QMSum presents significant challenges in long meeting summarization for future research. Dataset is available at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/QMSum.

When provided with sufficient explanatory context, smaller Language Models have been shown to exhibit strong reasoning ability on challenging short-answer question-answering tasks where the questions are unseen in training. We evaluate two methods for further improvement in this setting. Both methods focus on combining rationales generated by a larger Language Model with longer contexts created from a multi-hop dense retrieval system. The first method (RR) involves training a Rationale Ranking model to score both generated rationales and retrieved contexts with respect to relevance and truthfulness. We then use the scores to derive combined contexts from both knowledge sources using a number of combinatory strategies. For the second method (RATD) we utilise retrieval-augmented training datasets developed by Hartill et al. 2023 to train a smaller Reasoning model such that it becomes proficient at utilising relevant information from longer text sequences that may be only partially evidential and frequently contain many irrelevant sentences. We find that both methods significantly improve results. Our single best Reasoning model materially improves upon strong comparable prior baselines for unseen evaluation datasets (StrategyQA 58.9 rightarrow 61.7 acc., CommonsenseQA 63.6 rightarrow 72.7 acc., ARC-DA 31.6 rightarrow 52.1 F1, IIRC 25.5 rightarrow 27.3 F1) and a version utilising our prior knowledge of each type of question in selecting a context combination strategy does even better. Our proposed models also generally outperform direct prompts against much larger models (BLOOM 175B and StableVicuna 13B) in both few-shot chain-of-thought and standard few-shot settings.

Negation is an important characteristic of language, and a major component of information extraction from text. This subtask is of considerable importance to the biomedical domain. Over the years, multiple approaches have been explored to address this problem: Rule-based systems, Machine Learning classifiers, Conditional Random Field Models, CNNs and more recently BiLSTMs. In this paper, we look at applying Transfer Learning to this problem. First, we extensively review previous literature addressing Negation Detection and Scope Resolution across the 3 datasets that have gained popularity over the years: the BioScope Corpus, the Sherlock dataset, and the SFU Review Corpus. We then explore the decision choices involved with using BERT, a popular transfer learning model, for this task, and report state-of-the-art results for scope resolution across all 3 datasets. Our model, referred to as NegBERT, achieves a token level F1 score on scope resolution of 92.36 on the Sherlock dataset, 95.68 on the BioScope Abstracts subcorpus, 91.24 on the BioScope Full Papers subcorpus, 90.95 on the SFU Review Corpus, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art systems by a significant margin. We also analyze the model's generalizability to datasets on which it is not trained.

Users may strive to formulate an adequate textual query for their information need. Search engines assist the users by presenting query suggestions. To preserve the original search intent, suggestions should be context-aware and account for the previous queries issued by the user. Achieving context awareness is challenging due to data sparsity. We present a probabilistic suggestion model that is able to account for sequences of previous queries of arbitrary lengths. Our novel hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder architecture allows the model to be sensitive to the order of queries in the context while avoiding data sparsity. Additionally, our model can suggest for rare, or long-tail, queries. The produced suggestions are synthetic and are sampled one word at a time, using computationally cheap decoding techniques. This is in contrast to current synthetic suggestion models relying upon machine learning pipelines and hand-engineered feature sets. Results show that it outperforms existing context-aware approaches in a next query prediction setting. In addition to query suggestion, our model is general enough to be used in a variety of other applications.

Short Text Classification (STC) is crucial for processing and understanding the brief but substantial content prevalent on contemporary digital platforms. The STC encounters difficulties in grasping the semantic and syntactic intricacies, an issue that is apparent in traditional pre-trained language models. Although Graph Convolutional Networks enhance performance by integrating external knowledge bases, these methods are limited by the quality and extent of the knowledge applied. Recently, the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has significantly improved the performance of complex reasoning tasks. However, some studies have highlighted the limitations of their application in fundamental NLP tasks. Consequently, this study first employs CoT to investigate and enhance the capabilities of LLMs in STC tasks. We propose the Syntactic and Semantic Enrichment CoT (SSE-CoT) method, effectively decomposing the STC tasks into four distinct steps: (i) essential concept identification, (ii) common-sense knowledge retrieval, (iii) text rewriting, and (iv) classification. Furthermore, recognizing resource constraints in sectors like finance and healthcare, we then introduce the CoT-Driven Multi-Task Learning (CDMT) framework to extend these capabilities to smaller models. This framework begins by extracting rationales from LLMs and subsequently fine-tunes smaller models to optimize their performance. Extensive experimentation across six short-text benchmarks validated the efficacy of the proposed methods. In particular, SSE-CoT achieved state-of-the-art performance with substantial improvements on all datasets, particularly on the Ohsumed and TagMyNews datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in various natural language processing tasks, including question answering (QA) tasks. While incorporating new information with the retrieval of relevant passages is a promising way to improve QA with LLMs, the existing methods often require additional fine-tuning which becomes infeasible with recent LLMs. Augmenting retrieved passages via prompting has the potential to address this limitation, but this direction has been limitedly explored. To this end, we design a simple yet effective framework to enhance open-domain QA (ODQA) with LLMs, based on the summarized retrieval (SuRe). SuRe helps LLMs predict more accurate answers for a given question, which are well-supported by the summarized retrieval that could be viewed as an explicit rationale extracted from the retrieved passages. Specifically, SuRe first constructs summaries of the retrieved passages for each of the multiple answer candidates. Then, SuRe confirms the most plausible answer from the candidate set by evaluating the validity and ranking of the generated summaries. Experimental results on diverse ODQA benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of SuRe, with improvements of up to 4.6% in exact match (EM) and 4.0% in F1 score over standard prompting approaches. SuRe also can be integrated with a broad range of retrieval methods and LLMs. Finally, the generated summaries from SuRe show additional advantages to measure the importance of retrieved passages and serve as more preferred rationales by models and humans.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is essential for integrating external knowledge into Large Language Model (LLM) outputs. While the literature on RAG is growing, it primarily focuses on systematic reviews and comparisons of new state-of-the-art (SoTA) techniques against their predecessors, with a gap in extensive experimental comparisons. This study begins to address this gap by assessing various RAG methods' impacts on retrieval precision and answer similarity. We found that Hypothetical Document Embedding (HyDE) and LLM reranking significantly enhance retrieval precision. However, Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) and Cohere rerank did not exhibit notable advantages over a baseline Naive RAG system, and Multi-query approaches underperformed. Sentence Window Retrieval emerged as the most effective for retrieval precision, despite its variable performance on answer similarity. The study confirms the potential of the Document Summary Index as a competent retrieval approach. All resources related to this research are publicly accessible for further investigation through our GitHub repository ARAGOG (https://github.com/predlico/ARAGOG). We welcome the community to further this exploratory study in RAG systems.

We demonstrate that LLMs may learn indicators of document usefulness and modulate their updates accordingly. We introduce random strings ("tags") as indicators of usefulness in a synthetic fine-tuning dataset. Fine-tuning on this dataset leads to implicit meta-learning (IML): in further fine-tuning, the model updates to make more use of text that is tagged as useful. We perform a thorough empirical investigation of this phenomenon, finding (among other things) that (i) it occurs in both pretrained LLMs and those trained from scratch, as well as on a vision task, and (ii) larger models and smaller batch sizes tend to give more IML. We also use probing to examine how IML changes the way models store knowledge in their parameters. Finally, we reflect on what our results might imply about capabilities, risks, and controllability of future AI systems. Our code can be found at https://github.com/krasheninnikov/internalization.

We assessed the performance of commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 on tasks from the 2023 BioASQ challenge. In Task 11b Phase B, which is focused on answer generation, both models demonstrated competitive abilities with leading systems. Remarkably, they achieved this with simple zero-shot learning, grounded with relevant snippets. Even without relevant snippets, their performance was decent, though not on par with the best systems. Interestingly, the older and cheaper GPT-3.5-Turbo system was able to compete with GPT-4 in the grounded Q&A setting on factoid and list answers. In Task 11b Phase A, focusing on retrieval, query expansion through zero-shot learning improved performance, but the models fell short compared to other systems. The code needed to rerun these experiments is available through GitHub.

This paper carefully summarizes extensive and profound questions from all walks of life, focusing on the current high-profile AI field, covering multiple dimensions such as industry trends, academic research, technological innovation and business applications. This paper meticulously curates questions that are both thought-provoking and practically relevant, providing nuanced and insightful answers to each. To facilitate readers' understanding and reference, this paper specifically classifies and organizes these questions systematically and meticulously from the five core dimensions of computing power infrastructure, software architecture, data resources, application scenarios, and brain science. This work aims to provide readers with a comprehensive, in-depth and cutting-edge AI knowledge framework to help people from all walks of life grasp the pulse of AI development, stimulate innovative thinking, and promote industrial progress.

With the recent advances of large language models (LLMs), it is no longer infeasible to build an automated debate system that helps people to synthesise persuasive arguments. Previous work attempted this task by integrating multiple components. In our work, we introduce an argument mining dataset that captures the end-to-end process of preparing an argumentative essay for a debate, which covers the tasks of claim and evidence identification (Task 1 ED), evidence convincingness ranking (Task 2 ECR), argumentative essay summarisation and human preference ranking (Task 3 ASR) and metric learning for automated evaluation of resulting essays, based on human feedback along argument quality dimensions (Task 4 SQE). Our dataset contains 14k examples of claims that are fully annotated with the various properties supporting the aforementioned tasks. We evaluate multiple generative baselines for each of these tasks, including representative LLMs. We find, that while they show promising results on individual tasks in our benchmark, their end-to-end performance on all four tasks in succession deteriorates significantly, both in automated measures as well as in human-centred evaluation. This challenge presented by our proposed dataset motivates future research on end-to-end argument mining and summarisation. The repository of this project is available at https://github.com/HarrywillDr/ArgSum-Datatset

Pairwise re-ranking models predict which of two documents is more relevant to a query and then aggregate a final ranking from such preferences. This is often more effective than pointwise re-ranking models that directly predict a relevance value for each document. However, the high inference overhead of pairwise models limits their practical application: usually, for a set of k documents to be re-ranked, preferences for all k^2-k comparison pairs excluding self-comparisons are aggregated. We investigate whether the efficiency of pairwise re-ranking can be improved by sampling from all pairs. In an exploratory study, we evaluate three sampling methods and five preference aggregation methods. The best combination allows for an order of magnitude fewer comparisons at an acceptable loss of retrieval effectiveness, while competitive effectiveness is already achieved with about one third of the comparisons.

We describe the SemEval task of extracting keyphrases and relations between them from scientific documents, which is crucial for understanding which publications describe which processes, tasks and materials. Although this was a new task, we had a total of 26 submissions across 3 evaluation scenarios. We expect the task and the findings reported in this paper to be relevant for researchers working on understanding scientific content, as well as the broader knowledge base population and information extraction communities.

As large language models (LLMs) evolve, their ability to deliver personalized and context-aware responses offers transformative potential for improving user experiences. Existing personalization approaches, however, often rely solely on user history to augment the prompt, limiting their effectiveness in generating tailored outputs, especially in cold-start scenarios with sparse data. To address these limitations, we propose Personalized Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (PGraphRAG), a framework that leverages user-centric knowledge graphs to enrich personalization. By directly integrating structured user knowledge into the retrieval process and augmenting prompts with user-relevant context, PGraphRAG enhances contextual understanding and output quality. We also introduce the Personalized Graph-based Benchmark for Text Generation, designed to evaluate personalized text generation tasks in real-world settings where user history is sparse or unavailable. Experimental results show that PGraphRAG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art personalization methods across diverse tasks, demonstrating the unique advantages of graph-based retrieval for personalization.

Making the contents generated by Large Language Model (LLM) such as ChatGPT, accurate, credible and traceable is crucial, especially in complex knowledge-intensive tasks that require multi-step reasoning and each of which needs knowledge to solve. Introducing Information Retrieval (IR) to provide LLM with external knowledge is good potential to solve this problem. However, where and how to introduce IR into LLM is a big challenge. Previous work has the disadvantage that the wrong knowledge retrieved by IR misleads the LLM or breaks the reasoning chain of LLM. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Search-in-the-Chain (SearChain) for the interaction between LLM and IR to solve the challenges. First, LLM generates the global reasoning chain called Chain-of-Query (CoQ) where each node consists of an IR-oriented query and the answer to the query. Second, IR verifies the answer of each node of CoQ, it corrects the answer that is not consistent with the retrieved information when IR gives high confidence, which improves the credibility. Third, LLM can mark its missing knowledge in CoQ and IR can provide this knowledge to LLM. These three operations improve the accuracy of LLM for complex knowledge-intensive tasks in terms of reasoning ability and knowledge. Finally, SearChain generates the reasoning process and marks references to supporting documents for each reasoning step, which improves traceability. SearChain transforms the topology of reasoning from chain to tree, which can modify the reasoning direction. Experiment shows that SearChain outperforms baselines on complex knowledge-intensive tasks including multi-hop question-answering, slot filling, fact checking, and long-form question-answering.

A major factor in the recent success of large language models is the use of enormous and ever-growing text datasets for unsupervised pre-training. However, naively training a model on all available data may not be optimal (or feasible), as the quality of available text data can vary. Filtering out data can also decrease the carbon footprint and financial costs of training models by reducing the amount of training required. Data selection methods aim to determine which candidate data points to include in the training dataset and how to appropriately sample from the selected data points. The promise of improved data selection methods has caused the volume of research in the area to rapidly expand. However, because deep learning is mostly driven by empirical evidence and experimentation on large-scale data is expensive, few organizations have the resources for extensive data selection research. Consequently, knowledge of effective data selection practices has become concentrated within a few organizations, many of which do not openly share their findings and methodologies. To narrow this gap in knowledge, we present a comprehensive review of existing literature on data selection methods and related research areas, providing a taxonomy of existing approaches. By describing the current landscape of research, this work aims to accelerate progress in data selection by establishing an entry point for new and established researchers. Additionally, throughout this review we draw attention to noticeable holes in the literature and conclude the paper by proposing promising avenues for future research.

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools for content moderation, but their inference costs and latency make them prohibitive for casual use on large datasets, such as the Google Ads repository. This study proposes a method for scaling up LLM reviews for content moderation in Google Ads. First, we use heuristics to select candidates via filtering and duplicate removal, and create clusters of ads for which we select one representative ad per cluster. We then use LLMs to review only the representative ads. Finally, we propagate the LLM decisions for the representative ads back to their clusters. This method reduces the number of reviews by more than 3 orders of magnitude while achieving a 2x recall compared to a baseline non-LLM model. The success of this approach is a strong function of the representations used in clustering and label propagation; we found that cross-modal similarity representations yield better results than uni-modal representations.

This work delved into the realm of automatic text generation, exploring a variety of techniques ranging from traditional deterministic approaches to more modern stochastic methods. Through analysis of greedy search, beam search, top-k sampling, top-p sampling, contrastive searching, and locally typical searching, this work has provided valuable insights into the strengths, weaknesses, and potential applications of each method. Each text-generating method is evaluated using several standard metrics and a comparative study has been made on the performance of the approaches. Finally, some future directions of research in the field of automatic text generation are also identified.

Ensuring factual accuracy while maintaining the creative capabilities of Large Language Model Agents (LMAs) poses significant challenges in the development of intelligent agent systems. LMAs face prevalent issues such as information hallucinations, catastrophic forgetting, and limitations in processing long contexts when dealing with knowledge-intensive tasks. This paper introduces a KG-RAG (Knowledge Graph-Retrieval Augmented Generation) pipeline, a novel framework designed to enhance the knowledge capabilities of LMAs by integrating structured Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with the functionalities of LLMs, thereby significantly reducing the reliance on the latent knowledge of LLMs. The KG-RAG pipeline constructs a KG from unstructured text and then performs information retrieval over the newly created graph to perform KGQA (Knowledge Graph Question Answering). The retrieval methodology leverages a novel algorithm called Chain of Explorations (CoE) which benefits from LLMs reasoning to explore nodes and relationships within the KG sequentially. Preliminary experiments on the ComplexWebQuestions dataset demonstrate notable improvements in the reduction of hallucinated content and suggest a promising path toward developing intelligent systems adept at handling knowledge-intensive tasks.

Augmenting LLMs with context leads to improved performance across many applications. Despite much research on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, an open question is whether errors arise because LLMs fail to utilize the context from retrieval or the context itself is insufficient to answer the query. To shed light on this, we develop a new notion of sufficient context, along with a way to classify instances that have enough information to answer the query. We then use sufficient context to analyze several models and datasets. By stratifying errors based on context sufficiency, we find that proprietary LLMs (Gemini, GPT, Claude) excel at answering queries when the context is sufficient, but often output incorrect answers instead of abstaining when the context is not. On the other hand, open-source LLMs (Llama, Mistral, Gemma) hallucinate or abstain often, even with sufficient context. We further categorize cases when the context is useful, and improves accuracy, even though it does not fully answer the query and the model errs without the context. Building on our findings, we explore ways to reduce hallucinations in RAG systems, including a new selective generation method that leverages sufficient context information for guided abstention. Our method improves the fraction of correct answers among times where the model responds by 2-10% for Gemini, GPT, and Gemma.

Large Language Model (LLM) leaderboards based on benchmark rankings are regularly used to guide practitioners in model selection. Often, the published leaderboard rankings are taken at face value - we show this is a (potentially costly) mistake. Under existing leaderboards, the relative performance of LLMs is highly sensitive to (often minute) details. We show that for popular multiple choice question benchmarks (e.g. MMLU) minor perturbations to the benchmark, such as changing the order of choices or the method of answer selection, result in changes in rankings up to 8 positions. We explain this phenomenon by conducting systematic experiments over three broad categories of benchmark perturbations and identifying the sources of this behavior. Our analysis results in several best-practice recommendations, including the advantage of a hybrid scoring method for answer selection. Our study highlights the dangers of relying on simple benchmark evaluations and charts the path for more robust evaluation schemes on the existing benchmarks.

Document summarization is a task to shorten texts into concise and informative summaries. This paper introduces a novel dataset designed for summarizing multiple scientific articles into a section of a survey. Our contributions are: (1) SurveySum, a new dataset addressing the gap in domain-specific summarization tools; (2) two specific pipelines to summarize scientific articles into a section of a survey; and (3) the evaluation of these pipelines using multiple metrics to compare their performance. Our results highlight the importance of high-quality retrieval stages and the impact of different configurations on the quality of generated summaries.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in text generation within current NLP research. However, the lack of factual accuracy is still a dark cloud hanging over the LLM skyscraper. Structural knowledge prompting (SKP) is a prominent paradigm to integrate external knowledge into LLMs by incorporating structural representations, achieving state-of-the-art results in many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing methods often focus on specific problems, lacking a comprehensive exploration of the generalization and capability boundaries of SKP. This paper aims to evaluate and rethink the generalization capability of the SKP paradigm from four perspectives including Granularity, Transferability, Scalability, and Universality. To provide a thorough evaluation, we introduce a novel multi-granular, multi-level benchmark called SUBARU, consisting of 9 different tasks with varying levels of granularity and difficulty.

Recommender Systems are built to retrieve relevant items to satisfy users' information needs. The candidate corpus usually consists of a finite set of items that are ready to be served, such as videos, products, or articles. With recent advances in Generative AI such as GPT and Diffusion models, a new form of recommendation task is yet to be explored where items are to be created by generative models with personalized prompts. Taking image generation as an example, with a single prompt from the user and access to a generative model, it is possible to generate hundreds of new images in a few minutes. How shall we attain personalization in the presence of "infinite" items? In this preliminary study, we propose a two-stage framework, namely Prompt-Model Retrieval and Generated Item Ranking, to approach this new task formulation. We release GEMRec-18K, a prompt-model interaction dataset with 18K images generated by 200 publicly-available generative models paired with a diverse set of 90 textual prompts. Our findings demonstrate the promise of generative model recommendation as a novel personalization problem and the limitations of existing evaluation metrics. We highlight future directions for the RecSys community to advance towards generative recommender systems. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/MAPS-research/GEMRec.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at tackling various natural language tasks. However, due to the significant costs involved in re-training or fine-tuning them, they remain largely static and difficult to personalize. Nevertheless, a variety of applications could benefit from generations that are tailored to users' preferences, goals, and knowledge. Among them is web search, where knowing what a user is trying to accomplish, what they care about, and what they know can lead to improved search experiences. In this work, we propose a novel and general approach that augments an LLM with relevant context from users' interaction histories with a search engine in order to personalize its outputs. Specifically, we construct an entity-centric knowledge store for each user based on their search and browsing activities on the web, which is then leveraged to provide contextually relevant LLM prompt augmentations. This knowledge store is light-weight, since it only produces user-specific aggregate projections of interests and knowledge onto public knowledge graphs, and leverages existing search log infrastructure, thereby mitigating the privacy, compliance, and scalability concerns associated with building deep user profiles for personalization. We then validate our approach on the task of contextual query suggestion, which requires understanding not only the user's current search context but also what they historically know and care about. Through a number of experiments based on human evaluation, we show that our approach is significantly better than several other LLM-powered baselines, generating query suggestions that are contextually more relevant, personalized, and useful.

While user-generated product reviews often contain large quantities of information, their utility in addressing natural language product queries has been limited, with a key challenge being the need to aggregate information from multiple low-level sources (reviews) to a higher item level during retrieval. Existing methods for reviewed-item retrieval (RIR) typically take a late fusion (LF) approach which computes query-item scores by simply averaging the top-K query-review similarity scores for an item. However, we demonstrate that for multi-aspect queries and multi-aspect items, LF is highly sensitive to the distribution of aspects covered by reviews in terms of aspect frequency and the degree of aspect separation across reviews. To address these LF failures, we propose several novel aspect fusion (AF) strategies which include Large Language Model (LLM) query extraction and generative reranking. Our experiments show that for imbalanced review corpora, AF can improve over LF by a MAP@10 increase from 0.36 to 0.52, while achieving equivalent performance for balanced review corpora.

We propose a goal-driven web navigation as a benchmark task for evaluating an agent with abilities to understand natural language and plan on partially observed environments. In this challenging task, an agent navigates through a website, which is represented as a graph consisting of web pages as nodes and hyperlinks as directed edges, to find a web page in which a query appears. The agent is required to have sophisticated high-level reasoning based on natural languages and efficient sequential decision-making capability to succeed. We release a software tool, called WebNav, that automatically transforms a website into this goal-driven web navigation task, and as an example, we make WikiNav, a dataset constructed from the English Wikipedia. We extensively evaluate different variants of neural net based artificial agents on WikiNav and observe that the proposed goal-driven web navigation well reflects the advances in models, making it a suitable benchmark for evaluating future progress. Furthermore, we extend the WikiNav with question-answer pairs from Jeopardy! and test the proposed agent based on recurrent neural networks against strong inverted index based search engines. The artificial agents trained on WikiNav outperforms the engined based approaches, demonstrating the capability of the proposed goal-driven navigation as a good proxy for measuring the progress in real-world tasks such as focused crawling and question-answering.

Scientific literature searches are often exploratory, whereby users are not yet familiar with a particular field or concept but are interested in learning more about it. However, existing systems for scientific literature search are typically tailored to keyword-based lookup searches, limiting the possibilities for exploration. We propose NLP-KG, a feature-rich system designed to support the exploration of research literature in unfamiliar natural language processing (NLP) fields. In addition to a semantic search, NLP-KG allows users to easily find survey papers that provide a quick introduction to a field of interest. Further, a Fields of Study hierarchy graph enables users to familiarize themselves with a field and its related areas. Finally, a chat interface allows users to ask questions about unfamiliar concepts or specific articles in NLP and obtain answers grounded in knowledge retrieved from scientific publications. Our system provides users with comprehensive exploration possibilities, supporting them in investigating the relationships between different fields, understanding unfamiliar concepts in NLP, and finding relevant research literature. Demo, video, and code are available at: https://github.com/NLP-Knowledge-Graph/NLP-KG-WebApp.

We introduce a novel graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework specifically designed for the medical domain, called MedGraphRAG, aimed at enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities and generating evidence-based results, thereby improving safety and reliability when handling private medical data. Our comprehensive pipeline begins with a hybrid static-semantic approach to document chunking, significantly improving context capture over traditional methods. Extracted entities are used to create a three-tier hierarchical graph structure, linking entities to foundational medical knowledge sourced from medical papers and dictionaries. These entities are then interconnected to form meta-graphs, which are merged based on semantic similarities to develop a comprehensive global graph. This structure supports precise information retrieval and response generation. The retrieval process employs a U-retrieve method to balance global awareness and indexing efficiency of the LLM. Our approach is validated through a comprehensive ablation study comparing various methods for document chunking, graph construction, and information retrieval. The results not only demonstrate that our hierarchical graph construction method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models on multiple medical Q\&A benchmarks, but also confirms that the responses generated include source documentation, significantly enhancing the reliability of medical LLMs in practical applications. Code will be at: https://github.com/MedicineToken/Medical-Graph-RAG/tree/main

Wikimedia content is used extensively by the AI community and within the language modeling community in particular. In this paper, we provide a review of the different ways in which Wikimedia data is curated to use in NLP tasks across pre-training, post-training, and model evaluations. We point to opportunities for greater use of Wikimedia content but also identify ways in which the language modeling community could better center the needs of Wikimedia editors. In particular, we call for incorporating additional sources of Wikimedia data, a greater focus on benchmarks for LLMs that encode Wikimedia principles, and greater multilingualism in Wikimedia-derived datasets.

Understanding search queries is a hard problem as it involves dealing with "word salad" text ubiquitously issued by users. However, if a query resembles a well-formed question, a natural language processing pipeline is able to perform more accurate interpretation, thus reducing downstream compounding errors. Hence, identifying whether or not a query is well formed can enhance query understanding. Here, we introduce a new task of identifying a well-formed natural language question. We construct and release a dataset of 25,100 publicly available questions classified into well-formed and non-wellformed categories and report an accuracy of 70.7% on the test set. We also show that our classifier can be used to improve the performance of neural sequence-to-sequence models for generating questions for reading comprehension.

We present a comparative study between cross-encoder and LLMs rerankers in the context of re-ranking effective SPLADE retrievers. We conduct a large evaluation on TREC Deep Learning datasets and out-of-domain datasets such as BEIR and LoTTE. In the first set of experiments, we show how cross-encoder rerankers are hard to distinguish when it comes to re-rerank SPLADE on MS MARCO. Observations shift in the out-of-domain scenario, where both the type of model and the number of documents to re-rank have an impact on effectiveness. Then, we focus on listwise rerankers based on Large Language Models -- especially GPT-4. While GPT-4 demonstrates impressive (zero-shot) performance, we show that traditional cross-encoders remain very competitive. Overall, our findings aim to to provide a more nuanced perspective on the recent excitement surrounding LLM-based re-rankers -- by positioning them as another factor to consider in balancing effectiveness and efficiency in search systems.

Google users have different intents from their queries such as acquiring information, buying products, comparing or simulating services, looking for products, and so on. Understanding the right intention of users helps to provide i) better content on web pages from the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective and ii) more user-satisfying results from the search engine perspective. In this study, we aim to identify the user query's intent by taking advantage of Google results and machine learning methods. Our proposed approach is a clustering model that exploits some features to detect query's intent. A list of keywords extracted from the clustered queries is used to identify the intent of a new given query. Comparing the clustering results with the intents predicted by filtered keywords show the efficiency of the extracted keywords for detecting intents.

The next Point of Interest (POI) recommendation task is to predict users' immediate next POI visit given their historical data. Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) data, which is often used for the next POI recommendation task, comes with challenges. One frequently disregarded challenge is how to effectively use the abundant contextual information present in LBSN data. Previous methods are limited by their numerical nature and fail to address this challenge. In this paper, we propose a framework that uses pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle this challenge. Our framework allows us to preserve heterogeneous LBSN data in its original format, hence avoiding the loss of contextual information. Furthermore, our framework is capable of comprehending the inherent meaning of contextual information due to the inclusion of commonsense knowledge. In experiments, we test our framework on three real-world LBSN datasets. Our results show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models in all three datasets. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework in using contextual information as well as alleviating the commonly encountered cold-start and short trajectory problems.

We introduce OpenDebateEvidence, a comprehensive dataset for argument mining and summarization sourced from the American Competitive Debate community. This dataset includes over 3.5 million documents with rich metadata, making it one of the most extensive collections of debate evidence. OpenDebateEvidence captures the complexity of arguments in high school and college debates, providing valuable resources for training and evaluation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of fine-tuning state-of-the-art large language models for argumentative abstractive summarization across various methods, models, and datasets. By providing this comprehensive resource, we aim to advance computational argumentation and support practical applications for debaters, educators, and researchers. OpenDebateEvidence is publicly available to support further research and innovation in computational argumentation. Access it here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yusuf5/OpenCaselist

The capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models have been sketched out in great detail in recent years, providing an intriguing yet conflicting picture. On the one hand, LLMs demonstrate a general ability to solve problems. On the other hand, they show surprising reasoning gaps when compared to humans, casting doubt on the robustness of their generalisation strategies. The sheer volume of data used in the design of LLMs has precluded us from applying the method traditionally used to measure generalisation: train-test set separation. To overcome this, we study what kind of generalisation strategies LLMs employ when performing reasoning tasks by investigating the pretraining data they rely on. For two models of different sizes (7B and 35B) and 2.5B of their pretraining tokens, we identify what documents influence the model outputs for three simple mathematical reasoning tasks and contrast this to the data that are influential for answering factual questions. We find that, while the models rely on mostly distinct sets of data for each factual question, a document often has a similar influence across different reasoning questions within the same task, indicating the presence of procedural knowledge. We further find that the answers to factual questions often show up in the most influential data. However, for reasoning questions the answers usually do not show up as highly influential, nor do the answers to the intermediate reasoning steps. When we characterise the top ranked documents for the reasoning questions qualitatively, we confirm that the influential documents often contain procedural knowledge, like demonstrating how to obtain a solution using formulae or code. Our findings indicate that the approach to reasoning the models use is unlike retrieval, and more like a generalisable strategy that synthesises procedural knowledge from documents doing a similar form of reasoning.

We introduce a new problem KTRL+F, a knowledge-augmented in-document search task that necessitates real-time identification of all semantic targets within a document with the awareness of external sources through a single natural query. This task addresses following unique challenges for in-document search: 1) utilizing knowledge outside the document for extended use of additional information about targets to bridge the semantic gap between the query and the targets, and 2) balancing between real-time applicability with the performance. We analyze various baselines in KTRL+F and find there are limitations of existing models, such as hallucinations, low latency, or difficulties in leveraging external knowledge. Therefore we propose a Knowledge-Augmented Phrase Retrieval model that shows a promising balance between speed and performance by simply augmenting external knowledge embedding in phrase embedding. Additionally, we conduct a user study to verify whether solving KTRL+F can enhance search experience of users. It demonstrates that even with our simple model users can reduce the time for searching with less queries and reduced extra visits to other sources for collecting evidence. We encourage the research community to work on KTRL+F to enhance more efficient in-document information access.

Crosswords are a form of word puzzle that require a solver to demonstrate a high degree of proficiency in natural language understanding, wordplay, reasoning, and world knowledge, along with adherence to character and length constraints. In this paper we tackle the challenge of solving crosswords with Large Language Models (LLMs). We demonstrate that the current generation of state-of-the art (SoTA) language models show significant competence at deciphering cryptic crossword clues, and outperform previously reported SoTA results by a factor of 2-3 in relevant benchmarks. We also develop a search algorithm that builds off this performance to tackle the problem of solving full crossword grids with LLMs for the very first time, achieving an accuracy of 93\% on New York Times crossword puzzles. Contrary to previous work in this area which concluded that LLMs lag human expert performance significantly, our research suggests this gap is a lot narrower.

Large language models often encounter challenges with static knowledge and hallucinations, which undermine their reliability. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mitigates these issues by incorporating external information. However, user queries frequently contain noise and intent deviations, necessitating query rewriting to improve the relevance of retrieved documents. In this paper, we introduce DMQR-RAG, a Diverse Multi-Query Rewriting framework designed to improve the performance of both document retrieval and final responses in RAG. Specifically, we investigate how queries with varying information quantities can retrieve a diverse array of documents, presenting four rewriting strategies that operate at different levels of information to enhance the performance of baseline approaches. Additionally, we propose an adaptive strategy selection method that minimizes the number of rewrites while optimizing overall performance. Our methods have been rigorously validated through extensive experiments conducted in both academic and industry settings.

Modern web agents possess computer use abilities that allow them to interact with webpages by sending commands to a virtual keyboard and mouse. While such agents have considerable potential to assist human users with complex tasks, evaluating their capabilities in real-world settings poses a major challenge. To this end, we introduce BEARCUBS, a "small but mighty" benchmark of 111 information-seeking questions designed to evaluate a web agent's ability to search, browse, and identify factual information from the web. Unlike prior web agent benchmarks, solving BEARCUBS requires (1) accessing live web content rather than synthetic or simulated pages, which captures the unpredictability of real-world web interactions; and (2) performing a broad range of multimodal interactions (e.g., video understanding, 3D navigation) that cannot be bypassed via text-based workarounds. Each question in BEARCUBS has a corresponding short, unambiguous answer and a human-validated browsing trajectory, allowing for transparent evaluation of agent performance and strategies. A human study confirms that BEARCUBS questions are solvable but non-trivial (84.7% human accuracy), revealing search inefficiencies and domain knowledge gaps as common failure points. By contrast, state-of-the-art computer-using agents underperform, with the best-scoring system (OpenAI's Operator) reaching only 24.3% accuracy. These results highlight critical areas for improvement, including reliable source selection and more powerful multimodal capabilities. To facilitate future research, BEARCUBS will be updated periodically to replace invalid or contaminated questions, keeping the benchmark fresh for future generations of web agents.

An effective multi-turn instruction-following assistant can be developed by creating a simulator that can generate useful interaction data. Apart from relying on its intrinsic weights, an ideal user simulator should also be able to bootstrap external knowledge rapidly in its raw form to simulate the multifarious diversity of text available over the internet. Previous user simulators generally lacked diversity, were mostly closed domain, and necessitated rigid schema making them inefficient to rapidly scale to incorporate external knowledge. In this regard, we introduce, Kaucus, a Knowledge-Augmented User Simulator framework, to outline a process of creating diverse user simulators, that can seamlessly exploit external knowledge as well as benefit downstream assistant model training. Through two GPT-J based simulators viz., a Retrieval Augmented Simulator and a Summary Controlled Simulator we generate diverse simulator-assistant interactions. Through reward and preference model-based evaluations, we find that these interactions serve as useful training data and create more helpful downstream assistants. We also find that incorporating knowledge through retrieval augmentation or summary control helps create better assistants.

Co-occurrence networks are an important method in the field of natural language processing and text mining for discovering semantic relationships within texts. However, the traditional traversal algorithm for constructing co-occurrence networks has high time complexity and space complexity when dealing with large-scale text data. In this paper, we propose an optimized algorithm based on inverted indexing and breadth-first search to improve the efficiency of co-occurrence network construction and reduce memory consumption. Firstly, the traditional traversal algorithm is analyzed, and its performance issues in constructing co-occurrence networks are identified. Then, the detailed implementation process of the optimized algorithm is presented. Subsequently, the CSL large-scale Chinese scientific literature dataset is used for experimental validation, comparing the performance of the traditional traversal algorithm and the optimized algorithm in terms of running time and memory usage. Finally, using non-parametric test methods, the optimized algorithm is proven to have significantly better performance than the traditional traversal algorithm. The research in this paper provides an effective method for the rapid construction of co-occurrence networks, contributing to the further development of the Information Organization fields.

We present FRMT, a new dataset and evaluation benchmark for Few-shot Region-aware Machine Translation, a type of style-targeted translation. The dataset consists of professional translations from English into two regional variants each of Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese. Source documents are selected to enable detailed analysis of phenomena of interest, including lexically distinct terms and distractor terms. We explore automatic evaluation metrics for FRMT and validate their correlation with expert human evaluation across both region-matched and mismatched rating scenarios. Finally, we present a number of baseline models for this task, and offer guidelines for how researchers can train, evaluate, and compare their own models. Our dataset and evaluation code are publicly available: https://bit.ly/frmt-task

We present WeaverBird, an intelligent dialogue system designed specifically for the finance domain. Our system harnesses a large language model of GPT architecture that has been tuned using extensive corpora of finance-related text. As a result, our system possesses the capability to understand complex financial queries, such as "How should I manage my investments during inflation?", and provide informed responses. Furthermore, our system incorporates a local knowledge base and a search engine to retrieve relevant information. The final responses are conditioned on the search results and include proper citations to the sources, thus enjoying an enhanced credibility. Through a range of finance-related questions, we have demonstrated the superior performance of our system compared to other models. To experience our system firsthand, users can interact with our live demo at https://weaverbird.ttic.edu, as well as watch our 2-min video illustration at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyV2qQkX6Tc.

A research division plays an important role of driving innovation in an organization. Drawing insights, following trends, keeping abreast of new research, and formulating strategies are increasingly becoming more challenging for both researchers and executives as the amount of information grows in both velocity and volume. In this paper we present a use case of how a corporate research community, IBM Research, utilizes Semantic Web technologies to induce a unified Knowledge Graph from both structured and textual data obtained by integrating various applications used by the community related to research projects, academic papers, datasets, achievements and recognition. In order to make the Knowledge Graph more accessible to application developers, we identified a set of common patterns for exploiting the induced knowledge and exposed them as APIs. Those patterns were born out of user research which identified the most valuable use cases or user pain points to be alleviated. We outline two distinct scenarios: recommendation and analytics for business use. We will discuss these scenarios in detail and provide an empirical evaluation on entity recommendation specifically. The methodology used and the lessons learned from this work can be applied to other organizations facing similar challenges.

Logical reasoning is of vital importance to natural language understanding. Previous studies either employ graph-based models to incorporate prior knowledge about logical relations, or introduce symbolic logic into neural models through data augmentation. These methods, however, heavily depend on annotated training data, and thus suffer from over-fitting and poor generalization problems due to the dataset sparsity. To address these two problems, in this paper, we propose MERIt, a MEta-path guided contrastive learning method for logical ReasonIng of text, to perform self-supervised pre-training on abundant unlabeled text data. Two novel strategies serve as indispensable components of our method. In particular, a strategy based on meta-path is devised to discover the logical structure in natural texts, followed by a counterfactual data augmentation strategy to eliminate the information shortcut induced by pre-training. The experimental results on two challenging logical reasoning benchmarks, i.e., ReClor and LogiQA, demonstrate that our method outperforms the SOTA baselines with significant improvements.

Seeking answers to questions within long scientific research articles is a crucial area of study that aids readers in quickly addressing their inquiries. However, existing question-answering (QA) datasets based on scientific papers are limited in scale and focus solely on textual content. To address this limitation, we introduce SPIQA (Scientific Paper Image Question Answering), the first large-scale QA dataset specifically designed to interpret complex figures and tables within the context of scientific research articles across various domains of computer science. Leveraging the breadth of expertise and ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to understand figures, we employ automatic and manual curation to create the dataset. We craft an information-seeking task involving multiple images that cover a wide variety of plots, charts, tables, schematic diagrams, and result visualizations. SPIQA comprises 270K questions divided into training, validation, and three different evaluation splits. Through extensive experiments with 12 prominent foundational models, we evaluate the ability of current multimodal systems to comprehend the nuanced aspects of research articles. Additionally, we propose a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation strategy with in-context retrieval that allows fine-grained, step-by-step assessment and improves model performance. We further explore the upper bounds of performance enhancement with additional textual information, highlighting its promising potential for future research and the dataset's impact on revolutionizing how we interact with scientific literature.

Recommender systems often use text-side information to improve their predictions, especially in cold-start or zero-shot recommendation scenarios, where traditional collaborative filtering approaches cannot be used. Many approaches to text-mining side information for recommender systems have been proposed over recent years, with sentence Transformers being the most prominent one. However, these models are trained to predict semantic similarity without utilizing interaction data with hidden patterns specific to recommender systems. In this paper, we propose beeFormer, a framework for training sentence Transformer models with interaction data. We demonstrate that our models trained with beeFormer can transfer knowledge between datasets while outperforming not only semantic similarity sentence Transformers but also traditional collaborative filtering methods. We also show that training on multiple datasets from different domains accumulates knowledge in a single model, unlocking the possibility of training universal, domain-agnostic sentence Transformer models to mine text representations for recommender systems. We release the source code, trained models, and additional details allowing replication of our experiments at https://github.com/recombee/beeformer.

This paper introduces 26 guiding principles designed to streamline the process of querying and prompting large language models. Our goal is to simplify the underlying concepts of formulating questions for various scales of large language models, examining their abilities, and enhancing user comprehension on the behaviors of different scales of large language models when feeding into different prompts. Extensive experiments are conducted on LLaMA-1/2 (7B, 13B and 70B), GPT-3.5/4 to verify the effectiveness of the proposed principles on instructions and prompts design. We hope that this work provides a better guide for researchers working on the prompting of large language models. Project page is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/ATLAS.

This paper presents OG-RAG, an Ontology-Grounded Retrieval Augmented Generation method designed to enhance LLM-generated responses by anchoring retrieval processes in domain-specific ontologies. While LLMs are widely used for tasks like question answering and search, they struggle to adapt to specialized knowledge, such as industrial workflows or knowledge work, without expensive fine-tuning or sub-optimal retrieval methods. Existing retrieval-augmented models, such as RAG, offer improvements but fail to account for structured domain knowledge, leading to suboptimal context generation. Ontologies, which conceptually organize domain knowledge by defining entities and their interrelationships, offer a structured representation to address this gap. OG-RAG constructs a hypergraph representation of domain documents, where each hyperedge encapsulates clusters of factual knowledge grounded using domain-specific ontology. An optimization algorithm then retrieves the minimal set of hyperedges that constructs a precise, conceptually grounded context for the LLM. This method enables efficient retrieval while preserving the complex relationships between entities. OG-RAG applies to domains where fact-based reasoning is essential, particularly in tasks that require workflows or decision-making steps to follow predefined rules and procedures. These include industrial workflows in healthcare, legal, and agricultural sectors, as well as knowledge-driven tasks such as news journalism, investigative research, consulting and more. Our evaluations demonstrate that OG-RAG increases the recall of accurate facts by 55% and improves response correctness by 40% across four different LLMs. Additionally, OG-RAG enables 30% faster attribution of responses to context and boosts fact-based reasoning accuracy by 27% compared to baseline methods.

With the emergence of data marketplaces, the demand for methods to assess the value of data has increased significantly. While numerous techniques have been proposed for this purpose, none have specifically addressed graphs as the main data modality. Graphs are widely used across various fields, ranging from chemical molecules to social networks. In this study, we break down graphs into two main components: structural and featural, and we focus on evaluating data without relying on specific task-related metrics, making it applicable in practical scenarios where validation requirements may be lacking. We introduce a novel framework called blind message passing, which aligns the seller's and buyer's graphs using a shared node permutation based on graph matching. This allows us to utilize the graph Wasserstein distance to quantify the differences in the structural distribution of graph datasets, called the structural disparities. We then consider featural aspects of buyers' and sellers' graphs for data valuation and capture their statistical similarities and differences, referred to as relevance and diversity, respectively. Our approach ensures that buyers and sellers remain unaware of each other's datasets. Our experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in capturing the relevance, diversity, and structural disparities of seller data for buyers, particularly in graph-based data valuation scenarios.

Keeping track of scientific challenges, advances and emerging directions is a fundamental part of research. However, researchers face a flood of papers that hinders discovery of important knowledge. In biomedicine, this directly impacts human lives. To address this problem, we present a novel task of extraction and search of scientific challenges and directions, to facilitate rapid knowledge discovery. We construct and release an expert-annotated corpus of texts sampled from full-length papers, labeled with novel semantic categories that generalize across many types of challenges and directions. We focus on a large corpus of interdisciplinary work relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, ranging from biomedicine to areas such as AI and economics. We apply a model trained on our data to identify challenges and directions across the corpus and build a dedicated search engine. In experiments with 19 researchers and clinicians using our system, we outperform a popular scientific search engine in assisting knowledge discovery. Finally, we show that models trained on our resource generalize to the wider biomedical domain and to AI papers, highlighting its broad utility. We make our data, model and search engine publicly available. https://challenges.apps.allenai.org/

Contrastive learning has gained widespread adoption for retrieval tasks due to its minimal requirement for manual annotations. However, popular contrastive frameworks typically learn from binary relevance, making them ineffective at incorporating direct fine-grained rankings. In this paper, we curate a large-scale dataset featuring detailed relevance scores for each query-document pair to facilitate future research and evaluation. Subsequently, we propose Generalized Contrastive Learning for Multi-Modal Retrieval and Ranking (GCL), which is designed to learn from fine-grained rankings beyond binary relevance scores. Our results show that GCL achieves a 94.5% increase in NDCG@10 for in-domain and 26.3 to 48.8% increases for cold-start evaluations, all relative to the CLIP baseline and involving ground truth rankings.

Designing recommendation systems with limited or no available training data remains a challenge. To that end, a new combinatorial optimization problem is formulated to generate optimized item selection for experimentation with the goal to shorten the time for collecting randomized training data. We first present an overview of the optimized item selection problem and a multi-level optimization framework to solve it. The approach integrates techniques from discrete optimization, unsupervised clustering, and latent text embeddings. We then discuss how to incorporate optimized item selection with active learning as part of randomized exploration in an ongoing fashion.

In this study, we introduce FEET, a standardized protocol designed to guide the development and benchmarking of foundation models. While numerous benchmark datasets exist for evaluating these models, we propose a structured evaluation protocol across three distinct scenarios to gain a comprehensive understanding of their practical performance. We define three primary use cases: frozen embeddings, few-shot embeddings, and fully fine-tuned embeddings. Each scenario is detailed and illustrated through two case studies: one in sentiment analysis and another in the medical domain, demonstrating how these evaluations provide a thorough assessment of foundation models' effectiveness in research applications. We recommend this protocol as a standard for future research aimed at advancing representation learning models.

Using tools by Large Language Models (LLMs) is a promising avenue to extend their reach beyond language or conversational settings. The number of tools can scale to thousands as they enable accessing sensory information, fetching updated factual knowledge, or taking actions in the real world. In such settings, in-context learning by providing a short list of relevant tools in the prompt is a viable approach. To retrieve relevant tools, various approaches have been suggested, ranging from simple frequency-based matching to dense embedding-based semantic retrieval. However, such approaches lack the contextual and common-sense understanding required to retrieve the right tools for complex user requests. Rather than increasing the complexity of the retrieval component itself, we propose leveraging LLM understanding to generate a retrieval query. Then, the generated query is embedded and used to find the most relevant tools via a nearest-neighbor search. We investigate three approaches for query generation: zero-shot prompting, supervised fine-tuning on tool descriptions, and alignment learning by iteratively optimizing a reward metric measuring retrieval performance. By conducting extensive experiments on a dataset covering complex and multi-tool scenarios, we show that leveraging LLMs for query generation improves the retrieval for in-domain (seen tools) and out-of-domain (unseen tools) settings.

Extensive efforts in the past have been directed toward the development of summarization datasets. However, a predominant number of these resources have been (semi)-automatically generated, typically through web data crawling, resulting in subpar resources for training and evaluating summarization systems, a quality compromise that is arguably due to the substantial costs associated with generating ground-truth summaries, particularly for diverse languages and specialized domains. To address this issue, we present ACLSum, a novel summarization dataset carefully crafted and evaluated by domain experts. In contrast to previous datasets, ACLSum facilitates multi-aspect summarization of scientific papers, covering challenges, approaches, and outcomes in depth. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate the quality of our resource and the performance of models based on pretrained language models and state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). Additionally, we explore the effectiveness of extractive versus abstractive summarization within the scholarly domain on the basis of automatically discovered aspects. Our results corroborate previous findings in the general domain and indicate the general superiority of end-to-end aspect-based summarization. Our data is released at https://github.com/sobamchan/aclsum.

There are substantial instructional videos on the Internet, which provide us tutorials for completing various tasks. Existing instructional video datasets only focus on specific steps at the video level, lacking experiential guidelines at the task level, which can lead to beginners struggling to learn new tasks due to the lack of relevant experience. Moreover, the specific steps without guidelines are trivial and unsystematic, making it difficult to provide a clear tutorial. To address these problems, we present the GUIDE (Guideline-Guided) dataset, which contains 3.5K videos of 560 instructional tasks in 8 domains related to our daily life. Specifically, we annotate each instructional task with a guideline, representing a common pattern shared by all task-related videos. On this basis, we annotate systematic specific steps, including their associated guideline steps, specific step descriptions and timestamps. Our proposed benchmark consists of three sub-tasks to evaluate comprehension ability of models: (1) Step Captioning: models have to generate captions for specific steps from videos. (2) Guideline Summarization: models have to mine the common pattern in task-related videos and summarize a guideline from them. (3) Guideline-Guided Captioning: models have to generate captions for specific steps under the guide of guideline. We evaluate plenty of foundation models with GUIDE and perform in-depth analysis. Given the diversity and practicality of GUIDE, we believe that it can be used as a better benchmark for instructional video comprehension.

Opinion summarization focuses on generating summaries that reflect popular subjective information expressed in multiple online reviews. While generated summaries offer general and concise information about a particular hotel or product, the information may be insufficient to help the user compare multiple different choices. Thus, the user may still struggle with the question "Which one should I pick?" In this paper, we propose the comparative opinion summarization task, which aims at generating two contrastive summaries and one common summary from two different candidate sets of reviews. We develop a comparative summarization framework CoCoSum, which consists of two base summarization models that jointly generate contrastive and common summaries. Experimental results on a newly created benchmark CoCoTrip show that CoCoSum can produce higher-quality contrastive and common summaries than state-of-the-art opinion summarization models. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/megagonlabs/cocosum

In passage retrieval system, the initial passage retrieval results may be unsatisfactory, which can be refined by a reranking scheme. Existing solutions to passage reranking focus on enriching the interaction between query and each passage separately, neglecting the context among the top-ranked passages in the initial retrieval list. To tackle this problem, we propose a Hybrid and Collaborative Passage Reranking (HybRank) method, which leverages the substantial similarity measurements of upstream retrievers for passage collaboration and incorporates the lexical and semantic properties of sparse and dense retrievers for reranking. Besides, built on off-the-shelf retriever features, HybRank is a plug-in reranker capable of enhancing arbitrary passage lists including previously reranked ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate the stable improvements of performance over prevalent retrieval and reranking methods, and verify the effectiveness of the core components of HybRank.

Multi-hop logical reasoning is an established problem in the field of representation learning on knowledge graphs (KGs). It subsumes both one-hop link prediction as well as other more complex types of logical queries. Existing algorithms operate only on classical, triple-based graphs, whereas modern KGs often employ a hyper-relational modeling paradigm. In this paradigm, typed edges may have several key-value pairs known as qualifiers that provide fine-grained context for facts. In queries, this context modifies the meaning of relations, and usually reduces the answer set. Hyper-relational queries are often observed in real-world KG applications, and existing approaches for approximate query answering cannot make use of qualifier pairs. In this work, we bridge this gap and extend the multi-hop reasoning problem to hyper-relational KGs allowing to tackle this new type of complex queries. Building upon recent advancements in Graph Neural Networks and query embedding techniques, we study how to embed and answer hyper-relational conjunctive queries. Besides that, we propose a method to answer such queries and demonstrate in our experiments that qualifiers improve query answering on a diverse set of query patterns.

We introduce S2ORC, a large corpus of 81.1M English-language academic papers spanning many academic disciplines. The corpus consists of rich metadata, paper abstracts, resolved bibliographic references, as well as structured full text for 8.1M open access papers. Full text is annotated with automatically-detected inline mentions of citations, figures, and tables, each linked to their corresponding paper objects. In S2ORC, we aggregate papers from hundreds of academic publishers and digital archives into a unified source, and create the largest publicly-available collection of machine-readable academic text to date. We hope this resource will facilitate research and development of tools and tasks for text mining over academic text.

Information seeking users often pose questions with false presuppositions, especially when asking about unfamiliar topics. Most existing question answering (QA) datasets, in contrast, assume all questions have well defined answers. We introduce CREPE, a QA dataset containing a natural distribution of presupposition failures from online information-seeking forums. We find that 25% of questions contain false presuppositions, and provide annotations for these presuppositions and their corrections. Through extensive baseline experiments, we show that adaptations of existing open-domain QA models can find presuppositions moderately well, but struggle when predicting whether a presupposition is factually correct. This is in large part due to difficulty in retrieving relevant evidence passages from a large text corpus. CREPE provides a benchmark to study question answering in the wild, and our analyses provide avenues for future work in better modeling and further studying the task.

The internet contains a wealth of knowledge -- from the birthdays of historical figures to tutorials on how to code -- all of which may be learned by language models. However, there is a huge variability in the number of times a given piece of information appears on the web. In this paper, we study the relationship between the knowledge memorized by large language models and the information in their pre-training datasets. In particular, we show that a language model's ability to answer a fact-based question relates to how many documents associated with that question were seen during pre-training. We identify these relevant documents by entity linking pre-training datasets and counting documents that contain the same entities as a given question-answer pair. Our results demonstrate strong correlational and causal relationships between accuracy and relevant document count for numerous question answering datasets (e.g., TriviaQA), pre-training corpora (e.g., ROOTS), and model sizes (e.g., 176B parameters). Moreover, we find that while larger models are better at learning long-tail knowledge, we estimate that today's models must be scaled by many orders of magnitude to reach competitive QA performance on questions with little support in the pre-training data. Finally, we show that retrieval-augmentation can reduce the dependence on relevant document count, presenting a promising approach for capturing the long-tail.

Superlatives are used to single out elements with a maximal/minimal property. Semantically, superlatives perform a set comparison: something (or some things) has the min/max property out of a set. As such, superlatives provide an ideal phenomenon for studying implicit phenomena and discourse restrictions. While this comparison set is often not explicitly defined, its (implicit) restrictions can be inferred from the discourse context the expression appears in. In this work we provide an extensive computational study on the semantics of superlatives. We propose a unified account of superlative semantics which allows us to derive a broad-coverage annotation schema. Using this unified schema we annotated a multi-domain dataset of superlatives and their semantic interpretations. We specifically focus on interpreting implicit or ambiguous superlative expressions, by analyzing how the discourse context restricts the set of interpretations. In a set of experiments we then analyze how well models perform at variations of predicting superlative semantics, with and without context. We show that the fine-grained semantics of superlatives in context can be challenging for contemporary models, including GPT-4.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves the response quality of large language models (LLMs) by retrieving knowledge from external databases. Typical RAG approaches split the text database into chunks, organizing them in a flat structure for efficient searches. To better capture the inherent dependencies and structured relationships across the text database, researchers propose to organize textual information into an indexing graph, known asgraph-based RAG. However, we argue that the limitation of current graph-based RAG methods lies in the redundancy of the retrieved information, rather than its insufficiency. Moreover, previous methods use a flat structure to organize retrieved information within the prompts, leading to suboptimal performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose PathRAG, which retrieves key relational paths from the indexing graph, and converts these paths into textual form for prompting LLMs. Specifically, PathRAG effectively reduces redundant information with flow-based pruning, while guiding LLMs to generate more logical and coherent responses with path-based prompting. Experimental results show that PathRAG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across six datasets and five evaluation dimensions. The code is available at the following link: https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/PathRAG

Despite the critical need to align search targets with users' intention, retrievers often only prioritize query information without delving into the users' intended search context. Enhancing the capability of retrievers to understand intentions and preferences of users, akin to language model instructions, has the potential to yield more aligned search targets. Prior studies restrict the application of instructions in information retrieval to a task description format, neglecting the broader context of diverse and evolving search scenarios. Furthermore, the prevailing benchmarks utilized for evaluation lack explicit tailoring to assess instruction-following ability, thereby hindering progress in this field. In response to these limitations, we propose a novel benchmark,INSTRUCTIR, specifically designed to evaluate instruction-following ability in information retrieval tasks. Our approach focuses on user-aligned instructions tailored to each query instance, reflecting the diverse characteristics inherent in real-world search scenarios. Through experimental analysis, we observe that retrievers fine-tuned to follow task-style instructions, such as INSTRUCTOR, can underperform compared to their non-instruction-tuned counterparts. This underscores potential overfitting issues inherent in constructing retrievers trained on existing instruction-aware retrieval datasets.

The proposed research aims to develop an innovative semantic query processing system that enables users to obtain comprehensive information about research works produced by Computer Science (CS) researchers at the Australian National University (ANU). The system integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ANU Scholarly Knowledge Graph (ASKG), a structured repository of all research-related artifacts produced at ANU in the CS field. Each artifact and its parts are represented as textual nodes stored in a Knowledge Graph (KG). To address the limitations of traditional scholarly KG construction and utilization methods, which often fail to capture fine-grained details, we propose a novel framework that integrates the Deep Document Model (DDM) for comprehensive document representation and the KG-enhanced Query Processing (KGQP) for optimized complex query handling. DDM enables a fine-grained representation of the hierarchical structure and semantic relationships within academic papers, while KGQP leverages the KG structure to improve query accuracy and efficiency with LLMs. By combining the ASKG with LLMs, our approach enhances knowledge utilization and natural language understanding capabilities. The proposed system employs an automatic LLM-SPARQL fusion to retrieve relevant facts and textual nodes from the ASKG. Initial experiments demonstrate that our framework is superior to baseline methods in terms of accuracy retrieval and query efficiency. We showcase the practical application of our framework in academic research scenarios, highlighting its potential to revolutionize scholarly knowledge management and discovery. This work empowers researchers to acquire and utilize knowledge from documents more effectively and provides a foundation for developing precise and reliable interactions with LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities. Nevertheless, they still suffer from factual errors when tackling knowledge-intensive tasks. Retrieval-augmented reasoning represents a promising approach. However, significant challenges still persist, including inaccurate and insufficient retrieval for complex questions, as well as difficulty in integrating multi-source knowledge. To address this, we propose Beam Aggregation Reasoning, BeamAggR, a reasoning framework for knowledge-intensive multi-hop QA. BeamAggR explores and prioritizes promising answers at each hop of question. Concretely, we parse the complex questions into trees, which include atom and composite questions, followed by bottom-up reasoning. For atomic questions, the LLM conducts reasoning on multi-source knowledge to get answer candidates. For composite questions, the LLM combines beam candidates, explores multiple reasoning paths through probabilistic aggregation, and prioritizes the most promising trajectory. Extensive experiments on four open-domain multi-hop reasoning datasets show that our method significantly outperforms SOTA methods by 8.5%. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that BeamAggR elicits better knowledge collaboration and answer aggregation.

This paper addresses the problem of generating questions from a given context and an answer, specifically focusing on questions that require multi-hop reasoning across an extended context. Previous studies have suggested that key phrase selection is essential for question generation (QG), yet it is still challenging to connect such disjointed phrases into meaningful questions, particularly for long context. To mitigate this issue, we propose MultiFactor, a novel QG framework based on multi-level content planning. Specifically, MultiFactor includes two components: FA-model, which simultaneously selects key phrases and generates full answers, and Q-model which takes the generated full answer as an additional input to generate questions. Here, full answer generation is introduced to connect the short answer with the selected key phrases, thus forming an answer-aware summary to facilitate QG. Both FA-model and Q-model are formalized as simple-yet-effective Phrase-Enhanced Transformers, our joint model for phrase selection and text generation. Experimental results show that our method outperforms strong baselines on two popular QG datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/zeaver/MultiFactor.

As large language models (LLMs) grow larger and more sophisticated, assessing their "reasoning" capabilities in natural language grows more challenging. Recent question answering (QA) benchmarks that attempt to assess reasoning are often limited by a narrow scope of covered situations and subject matters. We introduce WikiWhy, a QA dataset built around a novel auxiliary task: explaining why an answer is true in natural language. WikiWhy contains over 9,000 "why" question-answer-rationale triples, grounded on Wikipedia facts across a diverse set of topics. Each rationale is a set of supporting statements connecting the question to the answer. WikiWhy serves as a benchmark for the reasoning capabilities of LLMs because it demands rigorous explicit rationales for each answer to demonstrate the acquisition of implicit commonsense knowledge, which is unlikely to be easily memorized. GPT-3 baselines achieve only 38.7% human-evaluated correctness in the end-to-end answer & explain condition, leaving significant room for future improvements.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown superior capability to solve reasoning problems with programs. While being a promising direction, most of such frameworks are trained and evaluated in settings with a prior knowledge of task requirements. However, as LLMs become more capable, it is necessary to assess their reasoning abilities in more realistic scenarios where many real-world problems are open-ended with ambiguous scope, and often require multiple formalisms to solve. To investigate this, we introduce the task of reasoning in the wild, where an LLM is tasked to solve a reasoning problem of unknown type by identifying the subproblems and their corresponding formalisms, and writing a program to solve each subproblem, guided by a tactic. We create a large tactic-guided trajectory dataset containing detailed solutions to a diverse set of reasoning problems, ranging from well-defined single-form reasoning (e.g., math, logic), to ambiguous and hybrid ones (e.g., commonsense, combined math and logic). This allows us to test various aspects of LLMs reasoning at the fine-grained level such as the selection and execution of tactics, and the tendency to take undesired shortcuts. In experiments, we highlight that existing LLMs fail significantly on problems with ambiguous and mixed scope, revealing critical limitations and overfitting issues (e.g. accuracy on GSM8K drops by at least 50\%). We further show the potential of finetuning a local LLM on the tactic-guided trajectories in achieving better performance. Project repo is available at github.com/gblackout/Reason-in-the-Wild

Today, large language models (LLMs) are taught to use new tools by providing a few demonstrations of the tool's usage. Unfortunately, demonstrations are hard to acquire, and can result in undesirable biased usage if the wrong demonstration is chosen. Even in the rare scenario that demonstrations are readily available, there is no principled selection protocol to determine how many and which ones to provide. As tasks grow more complex, the selection search grows combinatorially and invariably becomes intractable. Our work provides an alternative to demonstrations: tool documentation. We advocate the use of tool documentation, descriptions for the individual tool usage, over demonstrations. We substantiate our claim through three main empirical findings on 6 tasks across both vision and language modalities. First, on existing benchmarks, zero-shot prompts with only tool documentation are sufficient for eliciting proper tool usage, achieving performance on par with few-shot prompts. Second, on a newly collected realistic tool-use dataset with hundreds of available tool APIs, we show that tool documentation is significantly more valuable than demonstrations, with zero-shot documentation significantly outperforming few-shot without documentation. Third, we highlight the benefits of tool documentations by tackling image generation and video tracking using just-released unseen state-of-the-art models as tools. Finally, we highlight the possibility of using tool documentation to automatically enable new applications: by using nothing more than the documentation of GroundingDino, Stable Diffusion, XMem, and SAM, LLMs can re-invent the functionalities of the just-released Grounded-SAM and Track Anything models.

Readers of academic research papers often read with the goal of answering specific questions. Question Answering systems that can answer those questions can make consumption of the content much more efficient. However, building such tools requires data that reflect the difficulty of the task arising from complex reasoning about claims made in multiple parts of a paper. In contrast, existing information-seeking question answering datasets usually contain questions about generic factoid-type information. We therefore present QASPER, a dataset of 5,049 questions over 1,585 Natural Language Processing papers. Each question is written by an NLP practitioner who read only the title and abstract of the corresponding paper, and the question seeks information present in the full text. The questions are then answered by a separate set of NLP practitioners who also provide supporting evidence to answers. We find that existing models that do well on other QA tasks do not perform well on answering these questions, underperforming humans by at least 27 F1 points when answering them from entire papers, motivating further research in document-grounded, information-seeking QA, which our dataset is designed to facilitate.

Multi-hop reasoning (i.e., reasoning across two or more documents) is a key ingredient for NLP models that leverage large corpora to exhibit broad knowledge. To retrieve evidence passages, multi-hop models must contend with a fast-growing search space across the hops, represent complex queries that combine multiple information needs, and resolve ambiguity about the best order in which to hop between training passages. We tackle these problems via Baleen, a system that improves the accuracy of multi-hop retrieval while learning robustly from weak training signals in the many-hop setting. To tame the search space, we propose condensed retrieval, a pipeline that summarizes the retrieved passages after each hop into a single compact context. To model complex queries, we introduce a focused late interaction retriever that allows different parts of the same query representation to match disparate relevant passages. Lastly, to infer the hopping dependencies among unordered training passages, we devise latent hop ordering, a weak-supervision strategy in which the trained retriever itself selects the sequence of hops. We evaluate Baleen on retrieval for two-hop question answering and many-hop claim verification, establishing state-of-the-art performance.

We present a new approach for the approximate K-nearest neighbor search based on navigable small world graphs with controllable hierarchy (Hierarchical NSW, HNSW). The proposed solution is fully graph-based, without any need for additional search structures, which are typically used at the coarse search stage of the most proximity graph techniques. Hierarchical NSW incrementally builds a multi-layer structure consisting from hierarchical set of proximity graphs (layers) for nested subsets of the stored elements. The maximum layer in which an element is present is selected randomly with an exponentially decaying probability distribution. This allows producing graphs similar to the previously studied Navigable Small World (NSW) structures while additionally having the links separated by their characteristic distance scales. Starting search from the upper layer together with utilizing the scale separation boosts the performance compared to NSW and allows a logarithmic complexity scaling. Additional employment of a heuristic for selecting proximity graph neighbors significantly increases performance at high recall and in case of highly clustered data. Performance evaluation has demonstrated that the proposed general metric space search index is able to strongly outperform previous opensource state-of-the-art vector-only approaches. Similarity of the algorithm to the skip list structure allows straightforward balanced distributed implementation.

Existing retrieval benchmarks primarily consist of information-seeking queries (e.g., aggregated questions from search engines) where keyword or semantic-based retrieval is usually sufficient. However, many complex real-world queries require in-depth reasoning to identify relevant documents that go beyond surface form matching. For example, finding documentation for a coding question requires understanding the logic and syntax of the functions involved. To better benchmark retrieval on such challenging queries, we introduce BRIGHT, the first text retrieval benchmark that requires intensive reasoning to retrieve relevant documents. BRIGHT is constructed from the 1,398 real-world queries collected from diverse domains (such as economics, psychology, robotics, software engineering, earth sciences, etc.), sourced from naturally occurring or carefully curated human data. Extensive evaluation reveals that even state-of-the-art retrieval models perform poorly on BRIGHT. The leading model on the MTEB leaderboard [38 ], which achieves a score of 59.0 nDCG@10,2 produces a score of nDCG@10 of 18.0 on BRIGHT. We further demonstrate that augmenting queries with Chain-of-Thought reasoning generated by large language models (LLMs) improves performance by up to 12.2 points. Moreover, BRIGHT is robust against data leakage during pretraining of the benchmarked models as we validate by showing similar performance even when documents from the benchmark are included in the training data. We believe that BRIGHT paves the way for future research on retrieval systems in more realistic and challenging settings. Our code and data are available at https://brightbenchmark.github.io.

Natural Language Search (NLS) extends the capabilities of search engines that perform keyword search allowing users to issue queries in a more "natural" language. The engine tries to understand the meaning of the queries and to map the query words to the symbols it supports like Persons, Organizations, Time Expressions etc.. It, then, retrieves the information that satisfies the user's need in different forms like an answer, a record or a list of records. We present an NLS system we implemented as part of the Search service of a major CRM platform. The system is currently in production serving thousands of customers. Our user studies showed that creating dynamic reports with NLS saved more than 50% of our user's time compared to achieving the same result with navigational search. We describe the architecture of the system, the particularities of the CRM domain as well as how they have influenced our design decisions. Among several submodules of the system we detail the role of a Deep Learning Named Entity Recognizer. The paper concludes with discussion over the lessons learned while developing this product.

We study retrieving a set of documents that covers various perspectives on a complex and contentious question (e.g., will ChatGPT do more harm than good?). We curate a Benchmark for Retrieval Diversity for Subjective questions (BERDS), where each example consists of a question and diverse perspectives associated with the question, sourced from survey questions and debate websites. On this data, retrievers paired with a corpus are evaluated to surface a document set that contains diverse perspectives. Our framing diverges from most retrieval tasks in that document relevancy cannot be decided by simple string matches to references. Instead, we build a language model based automatic evaluator that decides whether each retrieved document contains a perspective. This allows us to evaluate the performance of three different types of corpus (Wikipedia, web snapshot, and corpus constructed on the fly with retrieved pages from the search engine) paired with retrievers. Retrieving diverse documents remains challenging, with the outputs from existing retrievers covering all perspectives on only 33.74% of the examples. We further study the impact of query expansion and diversity-focused reranking approaches and analyze retriever sycophancy. Together, we lay the foundation for future studies in retrieval diversity handling complex queries.

Citations in scientific papers not only help us trace the intellectual lineage but also are a useful indicator of the scientific significance of the work. Citation intents prove beneficial as they specify the role of the citation in a given context. In this paper, we present CitePrompt, a framework which uses the hitherto unexplored approach of prompt-based learning for citation intent classification. We argue that with the proper choice of the pretrained language model, the prompt template, and the prompt verbalizer, we can not only get results that are better than or comparable to those obtained with the state-of-the-art methods but also do it with much less exterior information about the scientific document. We report state-of-the-art results on the ACL-ARC dataset, and also show significant improvement on the SciCite dataset over all baseline models except one. As suitably large labelled datasets for citation intent classification can be quite hard to find, in a first, we propose the conversion of this task to the few-shot and zero-shot settings. For the ACL-ARC dataset, we report a 53.86% F1 score for the zero-shot setting, which improves to 63.61% and 66.99% for the 5-shot and 10-shot settings, respectively.

Query expansion is a widely used technique to improve the recall of search systems. In this paper, we propose an approach to query expansion that leverages the generative abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional query expansion approaches such as Pseudo-Relevance Feedback (PRF) that relies on retrieving a good set of pseudo-relevant documents to expand queries, we rely on the generative and creative abilities of an LLM and leverage the knowledge inherent in the model. We study a variety of different prompts, including zero-shot, few-shot and Chain-of-Thought (CoT). We find that CoT prompts are especially useful for query expansion as these prompts instruct the model to break queries down step-by-step and can provide a large number of terms related to the original query. Experimental results on MS-MARCO and BEIR demonstrate that query expansions generated by LLMs can be more powerful than traditional query expansion methods.

Relations such as "is influenced by", "is known for" or "is a competitor of" are inherently graded: we can rank entity pairs based on how well they satisfy these relations, but it is hard to draw a line between those pairs that satisfy them and those that do not. Such graded relations play a central role in many applications, yet they are typically not covered by existing Knowledge Graphs. In this paper, we consider the possibility of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to fill this gap. To this end, we introduce a new benchmark, in which entity pairs have to be ranked according to how much they satisfy a given graded relation. The task is formulated as a few-shot ranking problem, where models only have access to a description of the relation and five prototypical instances. We use the proposed benchmark to evaluate state-of-the-art relation embedding strategies as well as several recent LLMs, covering both publicly available LLMs and closed models such as GPT-4. Overall, we find a strong correlation between model size and performance, with smaller Language Models struggling to outperform a naive baseline. The results of the largest Flan-T5 and OPT models are remarkably strong, although a clear gap with human performance remains.

In this paper, we explore a new way for user targeting, where non-expert marketers could select their target users solely given demands in natural language form. The key to this issue is how to transform natural languages into practical structured logical languages, i.e., the structured understanding of marketer demands. Considering the impressive natural language processing ability of large language models (LLMs), we try to leverage LLMs to solve this issue. Past research indicates that the reasoning ability of LLMs can be effectively enhanced through chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. But existing methods still have some limitations: (1) Previous methods either use simple "Let's think step by step" spells or provide fixed examples in demonstrations without considering compatibility between prompts and questions, making LLMs ineffective in some complex reasoning tasks such as structured language transformation. (2) Previous methods are often implemented in closed-source models or excessively large models, which is not suitable in industrial practical scenarios. Based on these, we propose ARALLM (i.e., Analogical Reasoning Augmented Large Language Models) consisting of two modules: Analogical Reasoning based Prompting and Reasoning-Augmented Multi-Task Model Distillation.

The arXiv has collected 1.5 million pre-print articles over 28 years, hosting literature from scientific fields including Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science. Each pre-print features text, figures, authors, citations, categories, and other metadata. These rich, multi-modal features, combined with the natural graph structure---created by citation, affiliation, and co-authorship---makes the arXiv an exciting candidate for benchmarking next-generation models. Here we take the first necessary steps toward this goal, by providing a pipeline which standardizes and simplifies access to the arXiv's publicly available data. We use this pipeline to extract and analyze a 6.7 million edge citation graph, with an 11 billion word corpus of full-text research articles. We present some baseline classification results, and motivate application of more exciting generative graph models.

MIRACL (Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages) is a multilingual dataset we have built for the WSDM 2023 Cup challenge that focuses on ad hoc retrieval across 18 different languages, which collectively encompass over three billion native speakers around the world. These languages have diverse typologies, originate from many different language families, and are associated with varying amounts of available resources -- including what researchers typically characterize as high-resource as well as low-resource languages. Our dataset is designed to support the creation and evaluation of models for monolingual retrieval, where the queries and the corpora are in the same language. In total, we have gathered over 700k high-quality relevance judgments for around 77k queries over Wikipedia in these 18 languages, where all assessments have been performed by native speakers hired by our team. Our goal is to spur research that will improve retrieval across a continuum of languages, thus enhancing information access capabilities for diverse populations around the world, particularly those that have been traditionally underserved. This overview paper describes the dataset and baselines that we share with the community. The MIRACL website is live at http://miracl.ai/.

In this paper, we present a novel approach to knowledge extraction and retrieval using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for material science. Our goal is to automatically mine structured knowledge from millions of research articles in the field of polycrystalline materials and make it easily accessible to the broader community. The proposed method leverages NLP techniques such as entity recognition and document classification to extract relevant information and build an extensive knowledge base, from a collection of 9.5 Million publications. The resulting knowledge base is integrated into a search engine, which enables users to search for information about specific materials, properties, and experiments with greater precision than traditional search engines like Google. We hope our results can enable material scientists quickly locate desired experimental procedures, compare their differences, and even inspire them to design new experiments. Our website will be available at Github https://github.com/Xianjun-Yang/PcMSP.git soon.

In large organisations, identifying experts on a given topic is crucial in leveraging the internal knowledge spread across teams and departments. So-called enterprise expert retrieval systems automatically discover and structure employees' expertise based on the vast amount of heterogeneous data available about them and the work they perform. Evaluating these systems requires comprehensive ground truth expert annotations, which are hard to obtain. Therefore, the annotation process typically relies on automated recommendations of knowledge areas to validate. This case study provides an analysis of how these recommendations can impact the evaluation of expert finding systems. We demonstrate on a popular benchmark that system-validated annotations lead to overestimated performance of traditional term-based retrieval models and even invalidate comparisons with more recent neural methods. We also augment knowledge areas with synonyms to uncover a strong bias towards literal mentions of their constituent words. Finally, we propose constraints to the annotation process to prevent these biased evaluations, and show that this still allows annotation suggestions of high utility. These findings should inform benchmark creation or selection for expert finding, to guarantee meaningful comparison of methods.

Summarization datasets are often assembled either by scraping naturally occurring public-domain summaries -- which are nearly always in difficult-to-work-with technical domains -- or by using approximate heuristics to extract them from everyday text -- which frequently yields unfaithful summaries. In this work, we turn to a slower but more straightforward approach to developing summarization benchmark data: We hire highly-qualified contractors to read stories and write original summaries from scratch. To amortize reading time, we collect five summaries per document, with the first giving an overview and the subsequent four addressing specific questions. We use this protocol to collect SQuALITY, a dataset of question-focused summaries built on the same public-domain short stories as the multiple-choice dataset QuALITY (Pang et al., 2021). Experiments with state-of-the-art summarization systems show that our dataset is challenging and that existing automatic evaluation metrics are weak indicators of quality.

Long-form answers, consisting of multiple sentences, can provide nuanced and comprehensive answers to a broader set of questions. To better understand this complex and understudied task, we study the functional structure of long-form answers collected from three datasets, ELI5, WebGPT and Natural Questions. Our main goal is to understand how humans organize information to craft complex answers. We develop an ontology of six sentence-level functional roles for long-form answers, and annotate 3.9k sentences in 640 answer paragraphs. Different answer collection methods manifest in different discourse structures. We further analyze model-generated answers -- finding that annotators agree less with each other when annotating model-generated answers compared to annotating human-written answers. Our annotated data enables training a strong classifier that can be used for automatic analysis. We hope our work can inspire future research on discourse-level modeling and evaluation of long-form QA systems.

Legal case retrieval, which aims to find relevant cases for a query case, plays a core role in the intelligent legal system. Despite the success that pre-training has achieved in ad-hoc retrieval tasks, effective pre-training strategies for legal case retrieval remain to be explored. Compared with general documents, legal case documents are typically long text sequences with intrinsic logical structures. However, most existing language models have difficulty understanding the long-distance dependencies between different structures. Moreover, in contrast to the general retrieval, the relevance in the legal domain is sensitive to key legal elements. Even subtle differences in key legal elements can significantly affect the judgement of relevance. However, existing pre-trained language models designed for general purposes have not been equipped to handle legal elements. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose SAILER, a new Structure-Aware pre-traIned language model for LEgal case Retrieval. It is highlighted in the following three aspects: (1) SAILER fully utilizes the structural information contained in legal case documents and pays more attention to key legal elements, similar to how legal experts browse legal case documents. (2) SAILER employs an asymmetric encoder-decoder architecture to integrate several different pre-training objectives. In this way, rich semantic information across tasks is encoded into dense vectors. (3) SAILER has powerful discriminative ability, even without any legal annotation data. It can distinguish legal cases with different charges accurately. Extensive experiments over publicly available legal benchmarks demonstrate that our approach can significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art methods in legal case retrieval.

Experts advising decision-makers are likely to display expertise which varies as a function of the problem instance. In practice, this may lead to sub-optimal or discriminatory decisions against minority cases. In this work we model such changes in depth and breadth of knowledge as a partitioning of the problem space into regions of differing expertise. We provide here new algorithms that explicitly consider and adapt to the relationship between problem instances and experts' knowledge. We first propose and highlight the drawbacks of a naive approach based on nearest neighbor queries. To address these drawbacks we then introduce a novel algorithm - expertise trees - that constructs decision trees enabling the learner to select appropriate models. We provide theoretical insights and empirically validate the improved performance of our novel approach on a range of problems for which existing methods proved to be inadequate.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are foundational in language technologies, particularly in information retrieval (IR). Previous studies have utilized LLMs for query expansion, achieving notable improvements in IR. In this paper, we thoroughly explore the best practice of leveraging LLMs for query expansion. To this end, we introduce a training-free, straightforward yet effective framework called Multi-Text Generation Integration (MuGI). It leverages LLMs to generate multiple pseudo-references, integrating them with queries to enhance both sparse and dense retrievers. Our empirical findings reveal that: (1) Increasing the number of samples from LLMs benefits IR systems; (2) A balance between the query and pseudo-documents, and an effective integration strategy, is critical for high performance; (3) Contextual information from LLMs is essential, even boost a 23M model to outperform a 7B baseline model; (4) Pseudo relevance feedback can further calibrate queries for improved performance; and (5) Query expansion is widely applicable and versatile, consistently enhancing models ranging from 23M to 7B parameters. Our code and all generated references are made available at https://github.com/lezhang7/Retrieval_MuGI

We provide a reproducible, end-to-end demonstration of vector search with OpenAI embeddings using Lucene on the popular MS MARCO passage ranking test collection. The main goal of our work is to challenge the prevailing narrative that a dedicated vector store is necessary to take advantage of recent advances in deep neural networks as applied to search. Quite the contrary, we show that hierarchical navigable small-world network (HNSW) indexes in Lucene are adequate to provide vector search capabilities in a standard bi-encoder architecture. This suggests that, from a simple cost-benefit analysis, there does not appear to be a compelling reason to introduce a dedicated vector store into a modern "AI stack" for search, since such applications have already received substantial investments in existing, widely deployed infrastructure.

Keyphrases are crucial for searching and systematizing scholarly documents. Most current methods for keyphrase extraction are aimed at the extraction of the most significant words in the text. But in practice, the list of keyphrases often includes words that do not appear in the text explicitly. In this case, the list of keyphrases represents an abstractive summary of the source text. In this paper, we experiment with popular transformer-based models for abstractive text summarization using four benchmark datasets for keyphrase extraction. We compare the results obtained with the results of common unsupervised and supervised methods for keyphrase extraction. Our evaluation shows that summarization models are quite effective in generating keyphrases in the terms of the full-match F1-score and BERTScore. However, they produce a lot of words that are absent in the author's list of keyphrases, which makes summarization models ineffective in terms of ROUGE-1. We also investigate several ordering strategies to concatenate target keyphrases. The results showed that the choice of strategy affects the performance of keyphrase generation.

Many NLP researchers are experiencing an existential crisis triggered by the astonishing success of ChatGPT and other systems based on large language models (LLMs). After such a disruptive change to our understanding of the field, what is left to do? Taking a historical lens, we look for guidance from the first era of LLMs, which began in 2005 with large n-gram models for machine translation. We identify durable lessons from the first era, and more importantly, we identify evergreen problems where NLP researchers can continue to make meaningful contributions in areas where LLMs are ascendant. Among these lessons, we discuss the primacy of hardware advancement in shaping the availability and importance of scale, as well as the urgent challenge of quality evaluation, both automated and human. We argue that disparities in scale are transient and that researchers can work to reduce them; that data, rather than hardware, is still a bottleneck for many meaningful applications; that meaningful evaluation informed by actual use is still an open problem; and that there is still room for speculative approaches.

In this paper we describe the methods we used for our submissions to the GermEval 2021 shared task on the identification of toxic, engaging, and fact-claiming comments. For all three subtasks we fine-tuned freely available transformer-based models from the Huggingface model hub. We evaluated the performance of various pre-trained models after fine-tuning on 80% of the training data with different hyperparameters and submitted predictions of the two best performing resulting models. We found that this approach worked best for subtask 3, for which we achieved an F1-score of 0.736.

Large Language Models (LLM)-based systems, i.e. interconnected elements that include an LLM as a central component (e.g., conversational agents), are typically monolithic static architectures that rely on a single LLM for all user queries. However, they often require different preprocessing strategies, levels of reasoning, or knowledge. Generalist LLMs (i.e. GPT-4), trained on very large multi-topic corpora, can perform well in a variety of tasks. However, they require significant financial, energy, and hardware resources that may not be justified for basic tasks. This implies potentially investing in unnecessary costs for a given query. To overcome this problem, a routing mechanism routes user queries to the most suitable components, such as smaller LLMs or experts in specific topics. This approach may improve response quality while minimising costs. Routing can be expanded to other components of the conversational agent architecture, such as the selection of optimal embedding strategies. This paper explores key considerations for integrating routing into LLM-based systems, focusing on resource management, cost definition, and strategy selection. Our main contributions include a formalisation of the problem, a novel taxonomy of existing approaches emphasising relevance and resource efficiency, and a comparative analysis of these strategies in relation to industry practices. Finally, we identify critical challenges and directions for future research.

Recent studies have explored the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA). They typically require rewriting retrieved subgraphs into natural language formats comprehensible to LLMs. However, when tackling complex questions, the knowledge rewritten by existing methods may include irrelevant information, omit crucial details, or fail to align with the question's semantics. To address them, we propose a novel rewriting method CoTKR, Chain-of-Thought Enhanced Knowledge Rewriting, for generating reasoning traces and corresponding knowledge in an interleaved manner, thereby mitigating the limitations of single-step knowledge rewriting. Additionally, to bridge the preference gap between the knowledge rewriter and the question answering (QA) model, we propose a training strategy PAQAF, Preference Alignment from Question Answering Feedback, for leveraging feedback from the QA model to further optimize the knowledge rewriter. We conduct experiments using various LLMs across several KGQA benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with previous knowledge rewriting methods, CoTKR generates the most beneficial knowledge representation for QA models, which significantly improves the performance of LLMs in KGQA.