Task semantics can be expressed by a set of input-output examples or a piece of textual instruction. Conventional machine learning approaches for natural language processing (NLP) mainly rely on the availability of large-scale sets of task-specific examples. Two issues arise: First, collecting task-specific labeled examples does not apply to scenarios where tasks may be too complicated or costly to annotate, or the system is required to handle a new task immediately; second, this is not user-friendly since end-users are probably more willing to provide task description rather than a set of examples before using the system. Therefore, the community is paying increasing interest in a new supervision-seeking paradigm for NLP: learning to follow task instructions, that is, instruction following. Despite its impressive progress, there are some unsolved research equations that the community struggles with. This survey tries to summarize and provide insights into the current research on instruction following, particularly, by answering the following questions: (i) What is task instruction, and what instruction types exist? (ii) How should we model instructions? (iii) What are popular instruction following datasets and evaluation metrics? (iv) What factors influence and explain the instructions’ performance? (v) What challenges remain in instruction following? To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey about instruction following.1

This work proposes a challenging yet more realistic setting for zero-shot cross-task generalization: zero-shot instruction following, presuming the existence of a paragraph-style task definition while no demonstrations exist. To better learn the task supervision from the definition, we propose two strategies: first, to automatically find out the critical sentences in the definition; second, a ranking objective to force the model to generate the gold outputs with higher probabilities when those critical parts are highlighted in the definition. The joint efforts of the two strategies yield state-of-the-art performance on the Super-NaturalInstructions. Our code is available on GitHub.

Mathematical reasoning serves as a cornerstone for assessing the fundamental cognitive capabilities of human intelligence. In recent times, there has been a notable surge in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) geared towards the automated resolution of mathematical problems. However, the landscape of mathematical problem types is vast and varied, with LLM-oriented techniques undergoing evaluation across diverse datasets and settings. This diversity makes it challenging to discern the true advancements and obstacles within this burgeoning field. This survey endeavors to address four pivotal dimensions: i) a comprehensive exploration of the various mathematical problems and their corresponding datasets that have been investigated; ii) an examination of the spectrum of LLM-oriented techniques that have been proposed for mathematical problem-solving; iii) an overview of factors and concerns affecting LLMs in solving math; and iv) an elucidation of the persisting challenges within this domain. To the best of our knowledge, this survey stands as one of the first extensive examinations of the landscape of LLMs in the realm of mathematics, providing a holistic perspective on the current state, accomplishments, and future challenges in this rapidly evolving field.

Transliteration is an important task in natural language processing (NLP) which aims to convert a name in the source language to the target language without changing its pronunciation. Particularly, transliteration from English to Arabic is highly needed in many applications, especially in countries (e.g., United Arab Emirates (UAE)) whose most citizens are foreigners but the official language is Arabic. In such a task-oriented scenario, namely transliterating the English names to the corresponding Arabic ones, the performance of the transliteration model is highly important. However, most existing neural approaches mainly apply a universal transliteration model with advanced encoders and decoders to the task, where limited attention is paid to leveraging the phonemic association between English and Arabic to further improve model performance. In this paper, we focus on transliteration of people’s names from English to Arabic for the general public. In doing so, we collect a corpus named EANames by extracting high quality name pairs from online resources which better represent the names in the general public than linked Wikipedia entries that are always names of famous people). We propose a model for English-Arabic transliteration, where a memory module modeling the phonemic association between English and Arabic is used to guide the transliteration process. We run experiments on the collected data and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for English-Arabic transliteration.

A key problem in multi-task learning (MTL) research is how to select high-quality auxiliary tasks automatically. This paper presents GradTS, an automatic auxiliary task selection method based on gradient calculation in Transformer-based models. Compared to AUTOSEM, a strong baseline method, GradTS improves the performance of MT-DNN with a bert-base-cased backend model, from 0.33% to 17.93% on 8 natural language understanding (NLU) tasks in the GLUE benchmarks. GradTS is also time-saving since (1) its gradient calculations are based on single-task experiments and (2) the gradients are re-used without additional experiments when the candidate task set changes. On the 8 GLUE classification tasks, for example, GradTS costs on average 21.32% less time than AUTOSEM with comparable GPU consumption. Further, we show the robustness of GradTS across various task settings and model selections, e.g. mixed objectives among candidate tasks. The efficiency and efficacy of GradTS in these case studies illustrate its general applicability in MTL research without requiring manual task filtering or costly parameter tuning.

This paper studies the relative importance of attention heads in Transformer-based models to aid their interpretability in cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks. Prior research has found that only a few attention heads are important in each mono-lingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) task and pruning the remaining heads leads to comparable or improved performance of the model. However, the impact of pruning attention heads is not yet clear in cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks. Through extensive experiments, we show that (1) pruning a number of attention heads in a multi-lingual Transformer-based model has, in general, positive effects on its performance in cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks and (2) the attention heads to be pruned can be ranked using gradients and identified with a few trial experiments. Our experiments focus on sequence labeling tasks, with potential applicability on other cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks. For comprehensiveness, we examine two pre-trained multi-lingual models, namely multi-lingual BERT (mBERT) and XLM-R, on three tasks across 9 languages each. We also discuss the validity of our findings and their extensibility to truly resource-scarce languages and other task settings.