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This paper introduces PublicHearingBR, a Brazilian Portuguese dataset designed for summarizing long documents. The dataset consists of transcripts of public hearings held by the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, paired with news articles and structured summaries containing the individuals participating in the hearing and their statements or opinions. The dataset supports the development and evaluation of long document summarization systems in Portuguese. Our contributions include the dataset, a hybrid summarization system to establish a baseline for future studies, and a discussion on evaluation metrics for summarization involving large language models, addressing the challenge of hallucination in the generated summaries. As a result of this discussion, the dataset also provides annotated data that can be used in Natural Language Inference tasks in Portuguese., Comment: 26 pages

Language models are now capable of solving tasks that require dealing with long sequences consisting of hundreds of thousands of tokens. However, they often fail on tasks that require repetitive use of simple rules, even on sequences that are much shorter than those seen during training. For example, state-of-the-art LLMs can find common items in two lists with up to 20 items but fail when lists have 80 items. In this paper, we introduce MLissard, a multilingual benchmark designed to evaluate models' abilities to process and generate texts of varied lengths and offers a mechanism for controlling sequence complexity. Our evaluation of open-source and proprietary models show a consistent decline in performance across all models and languages as the complexity of the sequence increases. Surprisingly, the use of in-context examples in languages other than English helps increase extrapolation performance significantly. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/Lissard, Comment: GenBench Workshop by EMNLP 2024: Camera-ready version

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., Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. Submitted to BRACIS 2024

This work presents Retail-GPT, an open-source RAG-based chatbot designed to enhance user engagement in retail e-commerce by guiding users through product recommendations and assisting with cart operations. The system is cross-platform and adaptable to various e-commerce domains, avoiding reliance on specific chat applications or commercial activities. Retail-GPT engages in human-like conversations, interprets user demands, checks product availability, and manages cart operations, aiming to serve as a virtual sales agent and test the viability of such assistants across different retail businesses., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures

Evaluating the quality of text generated by large language models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge. Traditional metrics often fail to align well with human judgments, particularly in tasks requiring creativity and nuance. In this paper, we propose \textsc{Check-Eval}, a novel evaluation framework leveraging LLMs to assess the quality of generated text through a checklist-based approach. \textsc{Check-Eval} can be employed as both a reference-free and reference-dependent evaluation method, providing a structured and interpretable assessment of text quality. The framework consists of two main stages: checklist generation and checklist evaluation. We validate \textsc{Check-Eval} on two benchmark datasets: Portuguese Legal Semantic Textual Similarity and \textsc{SummEval}. Our results demonstrate that \textsc{Check-Eval} achieves higher correlations with human judgments compared to existing metrics, such as \textsc{G-Eval} and \textsc{GPTScore}, underscoring its potential as a more reliable and effective evaluation framework for natural language generation tasks. The code for our experiments is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/check-eval-0DB4}

Despite advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the growing availability of pretrained models, the English language remains the primary focus of model development. Continued pretraining on language-specific corpora provides a practical solution for adapting models to other languages. However, the impact of different pretraining settings on downstream tasks remains underexplored. This work introduces $\texttt{ptt5-v2}$, investigating the continued pretraining of T5 models for Portuguese. We first develop a baseline set of settings and pretrain models with sizes up to 3B parameters. Finetuning on three Portuguese downstream tasks (assin2 STS, assin2 RTE, and TweetSentBR) yields SOTA results on the latter two. We then explore the effects of different pretraining configurations, including quality filters, optimization strategies, and multi-epoch pretraining. Perhaps surprisingly, their impact remains subtle compared to our baseline. We release $\texttt{ptt5-v2}$ pretrained checkpoints and the finetuned MonoT5 rerankers on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/collections/unicamp-dl/ptt5-v2-666538a650188ba00aa8d2d0 and https://huggingface.co/collections/unicamp-dl/monoptt5-66653981877df3ea727f720d.

Multilingual pretraining has been a successful solution to the challenges posed by the lack of resources for languages. These models can transfer knowledge to target languages with minimal or no examples. Recent research suggests that monolingual models also have a similar capability, but the mechanisms behind this transfer remain unclear. Some studies have explored factors like language contamination and syntactic similarity. An emerging line of research suggests that the representations learned by language models contain two components: a language-specific and a language-agnostic component. The latter is responsible for transferring a more universal knowledge. However, there is a lack of comprehensive exploration of these properties across diverse target languages. To investigate this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment inspired by the work on the Scaling Laws for Transfer. We measured the amount of data transferred from a source language to a target language and found that models initialized from diverse languages perform similarly to a target language in a cross-lingual setting. This was surprising because the amount of data transferred to 10 diverse target languages, such as Spanish, Korean, and Finnish, was quite similar. We also found evidence that this transfer is not related to language contamination or language proximity, which strengthens the hypothesis that the model also relies on language-agnostic knowledge. Our experiments have opened up new possibilities for measuring how much data represents the language-agnostic representations learned during pretraining., Comment: NAACL 2024

Despite Portuguese being one of the most spoken languages in the world, there is a lack of high-quality information retrieval datasets in that language. We present Quati, a dataset specifically designed for the Brazilian Portuguese language. It comprises a collection of queries formulated by native speakers and a curated set of documents sourced from a selection of high-quality Brazilian Portuguese websites. These websites are frequented more likely by real users compared to those randomly scraped, ensuring a more representative and relevant corpus. To label the query-document pairs, we use a state-of-the-art LLM, which shows inter-annotator agreement levels comparable to human performance in our assessments. We provide a detailed description of our annotation methodology to enable others to create similar datasets for other languages, providing a cost-effective way of creating high-quality IR datasets with an arbitrary number of labeled documents per query. Finally, we evaluate a diverse range of open-source and commercial retrievers to serve as baseline systems. Quati is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/unicamp-dl/quati and all scripts at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/quati ., Comment: 22 pages

Language models are now capable of solving tasks that require dealing with long sequences consisting of hundreds of thousands of tokens. However, they often fail on tasks that require repetitive use of simple rules, even on sequences that are much shorter than those seen during training. For example, state-of-the-art LLMs can find common items in two lists with up to 20 items but fail when lists have 80 items. In this paper, we introduce Lissard, a benchmark comprising seven tasks whose goal is to assess the ability of models to process and generate wide-range sequence lengths, requiring repetitive procedural execution. Our evaluation of open-source (Mistral-7B and Mixtral-8x7B) and proprietary models (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) show a consistent decline in performance across all models as the complexity of the sequence increases. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/Lissard

ExaRanker recently introduced an approach to training information retrieval (IR) models, incorporating natural language explanations as additional labels. The method addresses the challenge of limited labeled examples, leading to improvements in the effectiveness of IR models. However, the initial results were based on proprietary language models such as GPT-3.5, which posed constraints on dataset size due to its cost and data privacy. In this paper, we introduce ExaRanker-Open, where we adapt and explore the use of open-source language models to generate explanations. The method has been tested using different LLMs and datasets sizes to better comprehend the effective contribution of data augmentation. Our findings reveal that incorporating explanations consistently enhances neural rankers, with benefits escalating as the LLM size increases. Notably, the data augmentation method proves advantageous even with large datasets, as evidenced by ExaRanker surpassing the target baseline by 0.6 nDCG@10 points in our study. To encourage further advancements by the research community, we have open-sourced both the code and datasets at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/ExaRanker.

This paper introduces INACIA (Instru\c{c}\~ao Assistida com Intelig\^encia Artificial), a groundbreaking system designed to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) into the operational framework of Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts (TCU). The system automates various stages of case analysis, including basic information extraction, admissibility examination, Periculum in mora and Fumus boni iuris analyses, and recommendations generation. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate INACIA's potential in extracting relevant information from case documents, evaluating its legal plausibility, and formulating propositions for judicial decision-making. Utilizing a validation dataset alongside LLMs, our evaluation methodology presents a novel approach to assessing system performance, correlating highly with human judgment. These results underscore INACIA's potential in complex legal task handling while also acknowledging the current limitations. This study discusses possible improvements and the broader implications of applying AI in legal contexts, suggesting that INACIA represents a significant step towards integrating AI in legal systems globally, albeit with cautious optimism grounded in the empirical findings.

Sound Event Detection and Localization (SELD) constitutes a complex task that depends on extensive multichannel audio recordings with annotated sound events and their respective locations. In this paper, we introduce a self-supervised approach for SELD adapted from the pre-training methodology of wav2vec 2.0, which learns representations directly from raw audio data, eliminating the need for supervision. By applying this approach to SELD, we can leverage a substantial amount of unlabeled 3D audio data to learn robust representations of sound events and their locations. Our method comprises two primary stages: pre-training and fine-tuning. In the pre-training phase, unlabeled 3D audio datasets are utilized to train our w2v-SELD model, capturing intricate high-level features and contextual information inherent in audio signals. Subsequently, in the fine-tuning stage, a smaller dataset with labeled SELD data fine-tunes the pre-trained model. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed self-supervised approach for SELD. The model surpasses baseline systems provided with the datasets and achieves competitive performance comparable to state-of-the-art supervised methods. The code and pre-trained parameters of our w2v-SELD model are available in this repository., Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures

The COVID-19 pandemic response highlighted the potential of deep learning methods in facilitating the diagnosis, prognosis and understanding of lung diseases through automated segmentation of pulmonary structures and lesions in chest computed tomography (CT). Automated separation of lung lesion into ground-glass opacity (GGO) and consolidation is hindered due to the labor-intensive and subjective nature of this task, resulting in scarce availability of ground truth for supervised learning. To tackle this problem, we propose MEDPSeg. MEDPSeg learns from heterogeneous chest CT targets through hierarchical polymorphic multitask learning (HPML). HPML explores the hierarchical nature of GGO and consolidation, lung lesions, and the lungs, with further benefits achieved through multitasking airway and pulmonary artery segmentation. Over 6000 volumetric CT scans from different partially labeled sources were used for training and testing. Experiments show PML enabling new state-of-the-art performance for GGO and consolidation segmentation tasks. In addition, MEDPSeg simultaneously performs segmentation of the lung parenchyma, airways, pulmonary artery, and lung lesions, all in a single forward prediction, with performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods specialized in each of those targets. Finally, we provide an open-source implementation with a graphical user interface at https://github.com/MICLab-Unicamp/medpseg., Comment: This manuscript is under review and might change in the future

Automated segmentation of lung abnormalities in computed tomography is an important step for diagnosing and characterizing lung disease. In this work, we improve upon a previous method and propose S-MEDSeg, a deep learning based approach for accurate segmentation of lung lesions in chest CT images. S-MEDSeg combines a pre-trained EfficientNet backbone, bidirectional feature pyramid network, and modern network advancements to achieve improved segmentation performance. A comprehensive ablation study was performed to evaluate the contribution of the proposed network modifications. The results demonstrate modifications introduced in S-MEDSeg significantly improves segmentation performance compared to the baseline approach. The proposed method is applied to an independent dataset of long COVID inpatients to study the effect of post-acute infection vaccination on extent of lung findings. Open-source code, graphical user interface and pip package are available at https://github.com/MICLab-Unicamp/medseg., Comment: Versao em portugu\^es brasileiro submetida para o XV EADCA 2023. Brazilian portuguese verson submitted to XV EADCA 2023

Recent work has explored Large Language Models (LLMs) to overcome the lack of training data for Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. The generalization abilities of these models have enabled the creation of synthetic in-domain data by providing instructions and a few examples on a prompt. InPars and Promptagator have pioneered this approach and both methods have demonstrated the potential of using LLMs as synthetic data generators for IR tasks. This makes them an attractive solution for IR tasks that suffer from a lack of annotated data. However, the reproducibility of these methods was limited, because InPars' training scripts are based on TPUs -- which are not widely accessible -- and because the code for Promptagator was not released and its proprietary LLM is not publicly accessible. To fully realize the potential of these methods and make their impact more widespread in the research community, the resources need to be accessible and easy to reproduce by researchers and practitioners. Our main contribution is a unified toolkit for end-to-end reproducible synthetic data generation research, which includes generation, filtering, training and evaluation. Additionally, we provide an interface to IR libraries widely used by the community and support for GPU. Our toolkit not only reproduces the InPars method and partially reproduces Promptagator, but also provides a plug-and-play functionality allowing the use of different LLMs, exploring filtering methods and finetuning various reranker models on the generated data. We also made available all the synthetic data generated in this work for the 18 different datasets in the BEIR benchmark which took more than 2,000 GPU hours to be generated as well as the reranker models finetuned on the synthetic data. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zetaalphavector/InPars

Medical image segmentation is an increasingly popular area of research in medical imaging processing and analysis. However, many researchers who are new to the field struggle with basic concepts. This tutorial paper aims to provide an overview of the fundamental concepts of medical imaging, with a focus on Magnetic Resonance and Computerized Tomography. We will also discuss deep learning algorithms, tools, and frameworks used for segmentation tasks, and suggest best practices for method development and image analysis. Our tutorial includes sample tasks using public data, and accompanying code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/MICLab-Unicamp/Medical-ImagingTutorial). By sharing our insights gained from years of experience in the field and learning from relevant literature, we hope to assist researchers in overcoming the initial challenges they may encounter in this exciting and important area of research., Comment: Equal contribution from Diedre Carmo, Gustavo Pinheiro, and L\'ivia Rodrigues

The present study aims to explore the capabilities of Language Models (LMs) in tackling high-stakes multiple-choice tests, represented here by the Exame Nacional do Ensino M\'edio (ENEM), a multidisciplinary entrance examination widely adopted by Brazilian universities. This exam poses challenging tasks for LMs, since its questions may span into multiple fields of knowledge, requiring understanding of information from diverse domains. For instance, a question may require comprehension of both statistics and biology to be solved. This work analyzed responses generated by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models for questions presented in the 2009-2017 exams, as well as for questions of the 2022 exam, which were made public after the training of the models was completed. Furthermore, different prompt strategies were tested, including the use of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts to generate explanations for answers. On the 2022 edition, the best-performing model, GPT-4 with CoT, achieved an accuracy of 87%, largely surpassing GPT-3.5 by 11 points. The code and data used on experiments are available at https://github.com/piresramon/gpt-4-enem.

This paper reports on a study of cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) using the mT5-XXL reranker on the NeuCLIR track of TREC 2022. Perhaps the biggest contribution of this study is the finding that despite the mT5 model being fine-tuned only on query-document pairs of the same language it proved to be viable for CLIR tasks, where query-document pairs are in different languages, even in the presence of suboptimal first-stage retrieval performance. The results of the study show outstanding performance across all tasks and languages, leading to a high number of winning positions. Finally, this study provides valuable insights into the use of mT5 in CLIR tasks and highlights its potential as a viable solution. For reproduction refer to https://github.com/unicamp-dl/NeuCLIR22-mT5

Recent work has shown that inducing a large language model (LLM) to generate explanations prior to outputting an answer is an effective strategy to improve performance on a wide range of reasoning tasks. In this work, we show that neural rankers also benefit from explanations. We use LLMs such as GPT-3.5 to augment retrieval datasets with explanations and train a sequence-to-sequence ranking model to output a relevance label and an explanation for a given query-document pair. Our model, dubbed ExaRanker, finetuned on a few thousand examples with synthetic explanations performs on par with models finetuned on 3x more examples without explanations. Furthermore, the ExaRanker model incurs no additional computational cost during ranking and allows explanations to be requested on demand.

Recently, InPars introduced a method to efficiently use large language models (LLMs) in information retrieval tasks: via few-shot examples, an LLM is induced to generate relevant queries for documents. These synthetic query-document pairs can then be used to train a retriever. However, InPars and, more recently, Promptagator, rely on proprietary LLMs such as GPT-3 and FLAN to generate such datasets. In this work we introduce InPars-v2, a dataset generator that uses open-source LLMs and existing powerful rerankers to select synthetic query-document pairs for training. A simple BM25 retrieval pipeline followed by a monoT5 reranker finetuned on InPars-v2 data achieves new state-of-the-art results on the BEIR benchmark. To allow researchers to further improve our method, we open source the code, synthetic data, and finetuned models: https://github.com/zetaalphavector/inPars/tree/master/tpu

This paper proposes a question-answering system that can answer questions whose supporting evidence is spread over multiple (potentially long) documents. The system, called Visconde, uses a three-step pipeline to perform the task: decompose, retrieve, and aggregate. The first step decomposes the question into simpler questions using a few-shot large language model (LLM). Then, a state-of-the-art search engine is used to retrieve candidate passages from a large collection for each decomposed question. In the final step, we use the LLM in a few-shot setting to aggregate the contents of the passages into the final answer. The system is evaluated on three datasets: IIRC, Qasper, and StrategyQA. Results suggest that current retrievers are the main bottleneck and that readers are already performing at the human level as long as relevant passages are provided. The system is also shown to be more effective when the model is induced to give explanations before answering a question. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/neuralmind-ai/visconde}.

Bi-encoders and cross-encoders are widely used in many state-of-the-art retrieval pipelines. In this work we study the generalization ability of these two types of architectures on a wide range of parameter count on both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. We find that the number of parameters and early query-document interactions of cross-encoders play a significant role in the generalization ability of retrieval models. Our experiments show that increasing model size results in marginal gains on in-domain test sets, but much larger gains in new domains never seen during fine-tuning. Furthermore, we show that cross-encoders largely outperform bi-encoders of similar size in several tasks. In the BEIR benchmark, our largest cross-encoder surpasses a state-of-the-art bi-encoder by more than 4 average points. Finally, we show that using bi-encoders as first-stage retrievers provides no gains in comparison to a simpler retriever such as BM25 on out-of-domain tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/guilhermemr04/scaling-zero-shot-retrieval.git, Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2206.02873

The widespread availability of search API's (both free and commercial) brings the promise of increased coverage and quality of search results for metasearch engines, while decreasing the maintenance costs of the crawling and indexing infrastructures. However, merging strategies frequently comprise complex pipelines that require careful tuning, which is often overlooked in the literature. In this work, we describe NeuralSearchX, a metasearch engine based on a multi-purpose large reranking model to merge results and highlight sentences. Due to the homogeneity of our architecture, we could focus our optimization efforts on a single component. We compare our system with Microsoft's Biomedical Search and show that our design choices led to a much cost-effective system with competitive QPS while having close to state-of-the-art results on a wide range of public benchmarks. Human evaluation on two domain-specific tasks shows that our retrieval system outperformed Google API by a large margin in terms of nDCG@10 scores. By describing our architecture and implementation in detail, we hope that the community will build on our design choices. The system is available at https://neuralsearchx.nsx.ai., Comment: published as a full paper at the DESIRES 2022 Conference. 13 pages

Airway segmentation in computed tomography images can be used to analyze pulmonary diseases, however, manual segmentation is labor intensive and relies on expert knowledge. This manuscript details our contribution to MICCAI's 2022 Airway Tree Modelling challenge, a competition of fully automated methods for airway segmentation. We employed a previously developed deep learning architecture based on a modified EfficientDet (MEDSeg), training from scratch for binary airway segmentation using the provided annotations. Our method achieved 90.72 Dice in internal validation, 95.52 Dice on external validation, and 93.49 Dice in the final test phase, while not being specifically designed or tuned for airway segmentation. Open source code and a pip package for predictions with our model and trained weights are in https://github.com/MICLab-Unicamp/medseg., Comment: Open source code, graphical user interface, and a pip package for predictions with our model and trained weights are in https://github.com/MICLab-Unicamp/medseg

Robust 2004 is an information retrieval benchmark whose large number of judgments per query make it a reliable evaluation dataset. In this paper, we present mRobust04, a multilingual version of Robust04 that was translated to 8 languages using Google Translate. We also provide results of three different multilingual retrievers on this dataset. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/unicamp-dl/mrobust, Comment: 4 pages

The zero-shot cross-lingual ability of models pretrained on multilingual and even monolingual corpora has spurred many hypotheses to explain this intriguing empirical result. However, due to the costs of pretraining, most research uses public models whose pretraining methodology, such as the choice of tokenization, corpus size, and computational budget, might differ drastically. When researchers pretrain their own models, they often do so under a constrained budget, and the resulting models might underperform significantly compared to SOTA models. These experimental differences led to various inconsistent conclusions about the nature of the cross-lingual ability of these models. To help further research on the topic, we released 10 monolingual byte-level models rigorously pretrained under the same configuration with a large compute budget (equivalent to 420 days on a V100) and corpora that are 4 times larger than the original BERT's. Because they are tokenizer-free, the problem of unseen token embeddings is eliminated, thus allowing researchers to try a wider range of cross-lingual experiments in languages with different scripts. Additionally, we release two models pretrained on non-natural language texts that can be used in sanity-check experiments. Experiments on QA and NLI tasks show that our monolingual models achieve competitive performance to the multilingual one, and hence can be served to strengthen our understanding of cross-lingual transferability in language models.