Demonstration Selection Strategies for Numerical Time Series Data-to-Text

Masayuki Kawarada, Tatsuya Ishigaki, Goran Topić, Hiroya Takamura


Abstract
Demonstration selection, the process of selecting examples used in prompts, plays a critical role in in-context learning. This paper explores demonstration selection methods for data-to-text tasks that involve numerical time series data as inputs.Previously developed demonstration selection methods primarily focus on textual inputs, often relying on embedding similarities of textual tokens to select similar instances from an example bank. However, this approach may not be suitable for numerical time series data.To address this issue, we propose two novel selection methods: (1) sequence similarity-based selection using various similarity measures, and (2) task-specific knowledge-based selection.From our experiments on two benchmark datasets, we found that our proposed models significantly outperform baseline selections and often surpass fine-tuned models. We also found that scale-invariant similarity measures such as Pearson’s correlation work better than scale-variant measures such as Euclidean distance.Manual evaluation by human judges also confirms that our proposed methods outperform conventional methods.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.435
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7378–7392
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.435/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.435
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Masayuki Kawarada, Tatsuya Ishigaki, Goran Topić, and Hiroya Takamura. 2024. Demonstration Selection Strategies for Numerical Time Series Data-to-Text. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 7378–7392, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Demonstration Selection Strategies for Numerical Time Series Data-to-Text (Kawarada et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.435.pdf