Shuo Zhang


2024

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The Knowledge Alignment Problem: Bridging Human and External Knowledge for Large Language Models
Shuo Zhang | Liangming Pan | Junzhou Zhao | William Yang Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

Large language models often necessitate grounding on external knowledge to generate faithful and reliable answers. Yet even with the correct groundings in the reference, they can ignore them and rely on wrong groundings or their inherent biases to hallucinate when users, being largely unaware of the specifics of the stored information, pose questions that might not directly correlate with the retrieved groundings. In this work, we formulate this knowledge alignment problem and introduce MixAlign, a framework that interacts with both the human user and the knowledge base to obtain and integrate clarifications on how the user question relates to the stored information. MixAlign employs a language model to achieve automatic knowledge alignment and, if necessary, further enhances this alignment through human user clarifications. Experimental results highlight the crucial role of knowledge alignment in boosting model performance and mitigating hallucination, with improvements noted up to 22.2% and 27.1% respectively. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of MixAlign in improving knowledge alignment by producing high-quality, user-centered clarifications.

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Generate-then-Ground in Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multi-hop Question Answering
Zhengliang Shi | Shuo Zhang | Weiwei Sun | Shen Gao | Pengjie Ren | Zhumin Chen | Zhaochun Ren
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Multi-Hop Question Answering (MHQA) task presents a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) due to the intensive knowledge required. Current solutions, like Retrieval-Augmented Generation, typically retrieve potential documents from an external corpus to read an answer. However, the performance of this retrieve-then-read paradigm is constrained by the retriever and the inevitable noise in the retrieved documents. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce a novel generate-then-ground (GenGround) framework, synergizing the parametric knowledge of LLMs and external documents to solve a multi-hop question. GenGround empowers LLMs to alternate two phases until the final answer is derived: (1) formulate a simpler, single-hop question and directly generate the answer; (2) ground the question-answer pair into retrieved documents, amending any wrong predictions in the answer. We also propose an instructional grounding distillation method to generalize our method into smaller models. Extensive experiments conducted on four datasets illustrate the superiority of our method. To further facilitate future research, we have collected a dataset that traces the reasoning process.

2023

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RADE: Reference-Assisted Dialogue Evaluation for Open-Domain Dialogue
Zhengliang Shi | Weiwei Sun | Shuo Zhang | Zhen Zhang | Pengjie Ren | Zhaochun Ren
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Evaluating open-domain dialogue systems is challenging for reasons such as the one-to-many problem, i.e., many appropriate responses other than just the golden response. As of now, automatic evaluation methods need better consistency with humans, while reliable human evaluation can be time- and cost-intensive. To this end, we propose the Reference-Assisted Dialogue Evaluation (RADE) approach under the multi-task learning framework, which leverages the pre-created utterance as reference other than the gold response to relief the one-to-many problem. Specifically, RADE explicitly compares reference and the candidate response to predict their overall scores. Moreover, an auxiliary response generation task enhances prediction via a shared encoder. To support RADE, we extend three datasets with additional rated responses other than just a golden response by human annotation. Experiments on our three datasets and two existing benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, where Pearson, Spearman, and Kendall correlations with human evaluation outperform state-of-the-art baselines.

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InfoSync: Information Synchronization across Multilingual Semi-structured Tables
Siddharth Khincha | Chelsi Jain | Vivek Gupta | Tushar Kataria | Shuo Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Information Synchronization of semi-structured data across languages is challenging. For example, Wikipedia tables in one language need to be synchronized with others. To address this problem, we introduce a new dataset InfoSync and a two-step method for tabular synchronization. InfoSync contains 100K entity-centric tables (Wikipedia Infoboxes) across 14 languages, of which a subset (~3.5K pairs) are manually annotated. The proposed method includes 1) Information Alignment to map rows and 2) Information Update for updating missing/outdated information for aligned tables across multilingual tables. When evaluated on InfoSync, information alignment achieves an F1 score of 87.91 (en <-> non-en). To evaluate information updation, we perform human-assisted Wikipedia edits on Infoboxes for 532 table pairs. Our approach obtains an acceptance rate of 77.28% on Wikipedia, showing the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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TempTabQA: Temporal Question Answering for Semi-Structured Tables
Vivek Gupta | Pranshu Kandoi | Mahek Vora | Shuo Zhang | Yujie He | Ridho Reinanda | Vivek Srikumar
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Semi-structured data, such as Infobox tables, often include temporal information about entities, either implicitly or explicitly. Can current NLP systems reason about such information in semi-structured tables? To tackle this question, we introduce the task of temporal question answering on semi-structured tables. We present a dataset, TEMPTABQA, which comprises 11,454 question-answer pairs extracted from 1,208 Wikipedia Infobox tables spanning more than 90 distinct domains. Using this dataset, we evaluate several state-of-the-art models for temporal reasoning. We observe that even the top-performing LLMs lag behind human performance by more than 13.5 F1 points. Given these results, our dataset has the potential to serve as a challenging benchmark to improve the temporal reasoning capabilities of NLP models.

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CoLLiE: Collaborative Training of Large Language Models in an Efficient Way
Kai Lv | Shuo Zhang | Tianle Gu | Shuhao Xing | Jiawei Hong | Keyu Chen | Xiaoran Liu | Yuqing Yang | Honglin Guo | Tengxiao Liu | Yu Sun | Qipeng Guo | Hang Yan | Xipeng Qiu
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly pivotal in a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Access to pre-trained models, courtesy of the open-source community, has made it possible to adapt these models to specific applications for enhanced performance. However, the substantial resources required for training these models necessitate efficient solutions. This paper introduces CoLLiE, an efficient library that facilitates collaborative training of large language models using 3D parallelism, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, and optimizers such as Lion, Adan, Sophia, and LOMO. With its modular design and comprehensive functionality, CoLLiE offers a balanced blend of efficiency, ease of use, and customization. CoLLiE has proven superior training efficiency in comparison with prevalent solutions in pre-training and fine-tuning scenarios. Furthermore, we provide an empirical evaluation of the correlation between model size and GPU memory consumption under different optimization methods, as well as an analysis of the throughput. Lastly, we carry out a comprehensive comparison of various optimizers and PEFT methods within the instruction-tuning context. CoLLiE is available at https://github.com/OpenLMLab/collie.

2022

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Right for the Right Reason: Evidence Extraction for Trustworthy Tabular Reasoning
Vivek Gupta | Shuo Zhang | Alakananda Vempala | Yujie He | Temma Choji | Vivek Srikumar
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

When pre-trained contextualized embedding-based models developed for unstructured data are adapted for structured tabular data, they perform admirably. However, recent probing studies show that these models use spurious correlations, and often predict inference labels by focusing on false evidence or ignoring it altogether. To study this issue, we introduce the task of Trustworthy Tabular Reasoning, where a model needs to extract evidence to be used for reasoning, in addition to predicting the label. As a case study, we propose a two-stage sequential prediction approach, which includes an evidence extraction and an inference stage. First, we crowdsource evidence row labels and develop several unsupervised and supervised evidence extraction strategies for InfoTabS, a tabular NLI benchmark. Our evidence extraction strategy outperforms earlier baselines. On the downstream tabular inference task, using only the automatically extracted evidence as the premise, our approach outperforms prior benchmarks.

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XInfoTabS: Evaluating Multilingual Tabular Natural Language Inference
Bhavnick Minhas | Anant Shankhdhar | Vivek Gupta | Divyanshu Aggarwal | Shuo Zhang
Proceedings of the Fifth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)

The ability to reason about tabular or semi-structured knowledge is a fundamental problem for today’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. While significant progress has been achieved in the direction of tabular reasoning, these advances are limited to English due to the absence of multilingual benchmark datasets for semi-structured data. In this paper, we use machine translation methods to construct a multilingual tabular NLI dataset, namely XINFOTABS, which expands the English tabular NLI dataset of INFOTABS to ten diverse languages. We also present several baselines for multilingual tabular reasoning, e.g., machine translation-based methods and cross-lingual. We discover that the XINFOTABS evaluation suite is both practical and challenging. As a result, this dataset will contribute to increased linguistic inclusion in tabular reasoning research and applications.

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Realistic Data Augmentation Framework for Enhancing Tabular Reasoning
Dibyakanti Kumar | Vivek Gupta | Soumya Sharma | Shuo Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Existing approaches to constructing training data for Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks, such as for semi-structured table reasoning, are either via crowdsourcing or fully automatic methods. However, the former is expensive and time consuming and thus limits scale, and the latter often produces naive examples that may lack complex reasoning. This paper develops a realistic semi-automated framework for data augmentation for tabular inference. Instead of manually generating a hypothesis for each table, our methodology generates hypothesis templates transferable to similar tables. In addition, our framework entails the creation of rational counterfactual tables based on human written logical constraints and premise paraphrasing. For our case study, we use the INFOTABS (Gupta et al., 2020), which is an entity centric tabular inference dataset. We observed that our framework could generate human-like tabular inference examples, which could benefit training data augmentation, especially in the scenario with limited supervision.

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Enhancing Tabular Reasoning with Pattern Exploiting Training
Abhilash Shankarampeta | Vivek Gupta | Shuo Zhang
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent methods based on pre-trained language models have exhibited superior performance over tabular tasks (e.g., tabular NLI), despite showing inherent problems such as not using the right evidence and inconsistent predictions across inputs while reasoning over the tabular data (Gupta et al., 2021). In this work, we utilize Pattern-Exploiting Training (PET) (i.e., strategic MLM) on pre-trained language models to strengthen these tabular reasoning models’ pre-existing knowledge and reasoning abilities. Our upgraded model exhibits a superior understanding of knowledge facts and tabular reasoning compared to current baselines. Additionally, we demonstrate that such models are more effective for underlying downstream tasks of tabular inference on INFOTABS. Furthermore, we show our model’s robustness against adversarial sets generated through various character and word level perturbations.

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Ring That Bell: A Corpus and Method for Multimodal Metaphor Detection in Videos
Khalid Alnajjar | Mika Hämäläinen | Shuo Zhang
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FLP)

We present the first openly available multimodal metaphor annotated corpus. The corpus consists of videos including audio and subtitles that have been annotated by experts. Furthermore, we present a method for detecting metaphors in the new dataset based on the textual content of the videos. The method achieves a high F1-score (62%) for metaphorical labels. We also experiment with other modalities and multimodal methods; however, these methods did not out-perform the text-based model. In our error analysis, we do identify that there are cases where video could help in disambiguating metaphors, however, the visual cues are too subtle for our model to capture. The data is available on Zenodo.

2021

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TAT-QA: A Question Answering Benchmark on a Hybrid of Tabular and Textual Content in Finance
Fengbin Zhu | Wenqiang Lei | Youcheng Huang | Chao Wang | Shuo Zhang | Jiancheng Lv | Fuli Feng | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Hybrid data combining both tabular and textual content (e.g., financial reports) are quite pervasive in the real world. However, Question Answering (QA) over such hybrid data is largely neglected in existing research. In this work, we extract samples from real financial reports to build a new large-scale QA dataset containing both Tabular And Textual data, named TAT-QA, where numerical reasoning is usually required to infer the answer, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, counting, comparison/sorting, and the compositions. We further propose a novel QA model termed TAGOP, which is capable of reasoning over both tables and text. It adopts sequence tagging to extract relevant cells from the table along with relevant spans from the text to infer their semantics, and then applies symbolic reasoning over them with a set of aggregation operators to arrive at the final answer. TAGOP achieves 58.0% inF1, which is an 11.1% absolute increase over the previous best baseline model, according to our experiments on TAT-QA. But this result still lags far behind performance of expert human, i.e.90.8% in F1. It is demonstrated that our TAT-QA is very challenging and can serve as a benchmark for training and testing powerful QA models that address hybrid form data.

2019

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Data mining Mandarin tone contour shapes
Shuo Zhang
Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

In spontaneous speech, Mandarin tones that belong to the same tone category may exhibit many different contour shapes. We explore the use of time-series data mining techniques for understanding the variability of tones in a large corpus of Mandarin newscast speech. First, we adapt a graph-based approach to characterize the clusters (fuzzy types) of tone contour shapes observed in each tone n-gram category. Second, we show correlations between these realized contour shape clusters and a bag of automatically extracted linguistic features. We discuss the implications of the current study within the context of phonological and information theory.

2016

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When Annotation Schemes Change Rules Help: A Configurable Approach to Coreference Resolution beyond OntoNotes
Amir Zeldes | Shuo Zhang
Proceedings of the Workshop on Coreference Resolution Beyond OntoNotes (CORBON 2016)

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Mining linguistic tone patterns with symbolic representation
Shuo Zhang
Proceedings of the 14th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology