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Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform various natural language processing tasks with suitable instruction prompts. However, designing effective prompts manually is challenging and time-consuming. Existing methods for automatic prompt optimization either lack flexibility or efficiency. In this paper, we propose an effective approach to automatically select the optimal prompt for a given input from a finite set of synthetic candidate prompts. Our approach consists of three steps: (1) clustering the training data and generating candidate prompts for each cluster using an LLM-based prompt generator; (2) synthesizing a dataset of input-prompt-output tuples for training a prompt evaluator to rank the prompts based on their relevance to the input; (3) using the prompt evaluator to select the best prompt for a new input at test time. Our approach balances prompt generality-specificity and eliminates the need for resource-intensive training and inference. It demonstrates competitive performance on zero-shot question-answering datasets: GSM8K, MultiArith, and AQuA., Comment: preprint

In this new era of rapid AI development, especially in language processing, the demand for AI in the legal domain is increasingly critical. In the context where research in other languages such as English, Japanese, and Chinese has been well-established, we introduce the first fundamental research for the Vietnamese language in the legal domain: legal textual entailment recognition through the Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing workshop. In analyzing participants' results, we discuss certain linguistic aspects critical in the legal domain that pose challenges that need to be addressed.

This paper introduces a new IncidentAI dataset for safety prevention. Different from prior corpora that usually contain a single task, our dataset comprises three tasks: named entity recognition, cause-effect extraction, and information retrieval. The dataset is annotated by domain experts who have at least six years of practical experience as high-pressure gas conservation managers. We validate the contribution of the dataset in the scenario of safety prevention. Preliminary results on the three tasks show that NLP techniques are beneficial for analyzing incident reports to prevent future failures. The dataset facilitates future research in NLP and incident management communities. The access to the dataset is also provided (the IncidentAI dataset is available at: https://github.com/Cinnamon/incident-ai-dataset)., Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 2023 (The Industry Track)

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, with GPT models at the forefront. While their remarkable performance spans a range of tasks, adapting LLMs for real-world business scenarios still poses challenges warranting further investigation. This paper presents an empirical analysis aimed at bridging the gap in adapting LLMs to practical use cases. To do that, we select the question answering (QA) task of insurance as a case study due to its challenge of reasoning. Based on the task we design a new model relied on LLMs which are empowered by additional knowledge extracted from insurance policy rulebooks and DBpedia. The additional knowledge helps LLMs to understand new concepts of insurance for domain adaptation. Preliminary results on two QA datasets show that knowledge enhancement significantly improves the reasoning ability of GPT-3.5 (55.80% and 57.83% in terms of accuracy). The analysis also indicates that existing public knowledge bases, e.g., DBPedia is beneficial for knowledge enhancement. Our findings reveal that the inherent complexity of business scenarios often necessitates the incorporation of domain-specific knowledge and external resources for effective problem-solving., Comment: Ongoing work to adapt LLMs for business scenarios

The task of Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE) aims to extract all potential emotion-cause pairs of a document without any annotation of emotion or cause clauses. Previous approaches on ECPE have tried to improve conventional two-step processing schemes by using complex architectures for modeling emotion-cause interaction. In this paper, we cast the ECPE task to the question answering (QA) problem and propose simple yet effective BERT-based solutions to tackle it. Given a document, our Guided-QA model first predicts the best emotion clause using a fixed question. Then the predicted emotion is used as a question to predict the most potential cause for the emotion. We evaluate our model on a standard ECPE corpus. The experimental results show that despite its simplicity, our Guided-QA achieves promising results and is easy to reproduce. The code of Guided-QA is also provided., Comment: ICAART 2023

Patent classification is the task that assigns each input patent into several codes (classes). Due to its high demand, several datasets and methods have been introduced. However, the lack of both systematic performance comparison of baselines and access to some datasets creates a gap for the task. To fill the gap, we introduce two new datasets in English and Japanese collected by using CPC codes. The English dataset includes 45,131 patent documents with 425 labels and the Japanese dataset contains 54,657 documents with 523 labels. To facilitate the next studies, we compare the performance of strong multi-label text classification methods on the two datasets. Experimental results show that AttentionXML is consistently better than other strong baselines. The ablation study is also conducted in two aspects: the contribution of different parts (title, abstract, description, and claims) of a patent and the behavior of baselines in terms of performance with different training data segmentation. We release the two new datasets with the code of the baselines., Comment: This paper describes an on-going work

Meetings are a universal process to make decisions in business and project collaboration. The capability to automatically itemize the decisions in daily meetings allows for extensive tracking of past discussions. To that end, we developed Meeting Decision Tracker, a prototype system to construct decision items comprising decision utterance detector (DUD) and decision utterance rewriter (DUR). We show that DUR makes a sizable contribution to improving the user experience by dealing with utterance collapse in natural conversation. An introduction video of our system is also available at https://youtu.be/TG1pJJo0Iqo., Comment: 7 pages, AACL-IJCNLP 2022

Successful Artificial Intelligence systems often require numerous labeled data to extract information from document images. In this paper, we investigate the problem of improving the performance of Artificial Intelligence systems in understanding document images, especially in cases where training data is limited. We address the problem by proposing a novel finetuning method using reinforcement learning. Our approach treats the Information Extraction model as a policy network and uses policy gradient training to update the model to maximize combined reward functions that complement the traditional cross-entropy losses. Our experiments on four datasets using labels and expert feedback demonstrate that our finetuning mechanism consistently improves the performance of a state-of-the-art information extractor, especially in the small training data regime., Comment: Accepted to ICONIP 2022

This paper introduces a new information extraction model for business documents. Different from prior studies which only base on span extraction or sequence labeling, the model takes into account advantage of both span extraction and sequence labeling. The combination allows the model to deal with long documents with sparse information (the small amount of extracted information). The model is trained end-to-end to jointly optimize the two tasks in a unified manner. Experimental results on four business datasets in English and Japanese show that the model achieves promising results and is significantly faster than the normal span-based extraction method. The code is also available., Comment: Accepted to IJCNN 2022

For summarization, human preference is critical to tame outputs of the summarizer in favor of human interests, as ground-truth summaries are scarce and ambiguous. Practical settings require dynamic exchanges between human and AI agent wherein feedback is provided in an online manner, a few at a time. In this paper, we introduce a new framework to train summarization models with preference feedback interactively. By properly leveraging offline data and a novel reward model, we improve the performance regarding ROUGE scores and sample-efficiency. Our experiments on three various datasets confirm the benefit of the proposed framework in active, few-shot and online settings of preference learning., Comment: The paper is accepted at NAACL 2022

This paper introduces a model for incomplete utterance restoration (IUR) called JET (\textbf{J}oint learning token \textbf{E}xtraction and \textbf{T}ext generation). Different from prior studies that only work on extraction or abstraction datasets, we design a simple but effective model, working for both scenarios of IUR. Our design simulates the nature of IUR, where omitted tokens from the context contribute to restoration. From this, we construct a Picker that identifies the omitted tokens. To support the picker, we design two label creation methods (soft and hard labels), which can work in cases of no annotation data for the omitted tokens. The restoration is done by using a Generator with the help of the Picker on joint learning. Promising results on four benchmark datasets in extraction and abstraction scenarios show that our model is better than the pretrained T5 and non-generative language model methods in both rich and limited training data settings.\footnote{The code is available at \url{https://github.com/shumpei19/JET}}, Comment: This paper was accepted by 2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2022). It includes 10 pages, 2 figures

Automatic summarization of legal texts is an important and still a challenging task since legal documents are often long and complicated with unusual structures and styles. Recent advances of deep models trained end-to-end with differentiable losses can well-summarize natural text, yet when applied to legal domain, they show limited results. In this paper, we propose to use reinforcement learning to train current deep summarization models to improve their performance on the legal domain. To this end, we adopt proximal policy optimization methods and introduce novel reward functions that encourage the generation of candidate summaries satisfying both lexical and semantic criteria. We apply our method to training different summarization backbones and observe a consistent and significant performance gain across 3 public legal datasets.

Information extraction (IE) for visually-rich documents (VRDs) has achieved SOTA performance recently thanks to the adaptation of Transformer-based language models, which shows the great potential of pre-training methods. In this paper, we present a new approach to improve the capability of language model pre-training on VRDs. Firstly, we introduce a new query-based IE model that employs span extraction instead of using the common sequence labeling approach. Secondly, to further extend the span extraction formulation, we propose a new training task that focuses on modelling the relationships among semantic entities within a document. This task enables target spans to be extracted recursively and can be used to pre-train the model or as an IE downstream task. Evaluation on three datasets of popular business documents (invoices, receipts) shows that our proposed method achieves significant improvements compared to existing models. The method also provides a mechanism for knowledge accumulation from multiple downstream IE tasks., Comment: Accepted to Document Images and Language Workshop at ICDAR 2021

Sentence compression is the task of creating a shorter version of an input sentence while keeping important information. In this paper, we extend the task of compression by deletion with the use of contextual embeddings. Different from prior work usually using non-contextual embeddings (Glove or Word2Vec), we exploit contextual embeddings that enable our model capturing the context of inputs. More precisely, we utilize contextual embeddings stacked by bidirectional Long-short Term Memory and Conditional Random Fields for dealing with sequence labeling. Experimental results on a benchmark Google dataset show that by utilizing contextual embeddings, our model achieves a new state-of-the-art F-score compared to strong methods reported on the leader board., Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, accepted by ICCCI 2020

This paper presents a practical approach to fine-grained information extraction. Through plenty of experiences of authors in practically applying information extraction to business process automation, there can be found a couple of fundamental technical challenges: (i) the availability of labeled data is usually limited and (ii) highly detailed classification is required. The main idea of our proposal is to leverage the concept of transfer learning, which is to reuse the pre-trained model of deep neural networks, with a combination of common statistical classifiers to determine the class of each extracted term. To do that, we first exploit BERT to deal with the limitation of training data in real scenarios, then stack BERT with Convolutional Neural Networks to learn hidden representation for classification. To validate our approach, we applied our model to an actual case of document processing, which is a process of competitive bids for government projects in Japan. We used 100 documents for training and testing and confirmed that the model enables to extract fine-grained named entities with a detailed level of information preciseness specialized in the targeted business process, such as a department name of application receivers., Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, PACLING conference

This paper presents a study of employing Ranking SVM and Convolutional Neural Network for two missions: legal information retrieval and question answering in the Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment. For the first task, our proposed model used a triple of features (LSI, Manhattan, Jaccard), and is based on paragraph level instead of article level as in previous studies. In fact, each single-paragraph article corresponds to a particular paragraph in a huge multiple-paragraph article. For the legal question answering task, additional statistical features from information retrieval task integrated into Convolutional Neural Network contribute to higher accuracy., Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, Tenth International Workshop on Juris-informatics (JURISIN 2016) associated with JSAI International Symposia on AI 2016 (IsAI-2016)

In the context of the Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment (COLIEE), we propose a method comprising the necessary steps for finding relevant documents to a legal question and deciding on textual entailment evidence to provide a correct answer. The proposed method is based on the combination of several lexical and morphological characteristics, to build a language model and a set of features for Machine Learning algorithms. We provide a detailed study on the proposed method performance and failure cases, indicating that it is competitive with state-of-the-art approaches on Legal Information Retrieval and Question Answering, while not needing extensive training data nor depending on expert produced knowledge. The proposed method achieved significant results in the competition, indicating a substantial level of adequacy for the tasks addressed., Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, Lecture notes in computer science: New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2016/03

This paper presents our method to retrieve relevant queries given a new question in the context of Discovery Challenge: Learning to Re-Ranking Questions for Community Question Answering competition. In order to do that, a set of learning to rank methods was investigated to select an appropriate method. The selected method was optimized on training data by using a search strategy. After optimizing, the method was applied to development and test set. Results from the competition indicate that the performance of our method outperforms almost participants and show that Ranking SVM is efficient for retrieving relevant queries in community question answering., Comment: Nine pages, three figures, ECML/PKDD 2016 Discovery Challenge: Learning to Re-Rank Questions for Community Question Answering