Vijay Viswanathan


2024

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Large Language Models Enable Few-Shot Clustering
Vijay Viswanathan | Kiril Gashteovski | Kiril Gashteovski | Carolin Lawrence | Tongshuang Wu | Graham Neubig
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 12

Unlike traditional unsupervised clustering, semi-supervised clustering allows users to provide meaningful structure to the data, which helps the clustering algorithm to match the user’s intent. Existing approaches to semi-supervised clustering require a significant amount of feedback from an expert to improve the clusters. In this paper, we ask whether a large language model (LLM) can amplify an expert’s guidance to enable query-efficient, few-shot semi-supervised text clustering. We show that LLMs are surprisingly effective at improving clustering. We explore three stages where LLMs can be incorporated into clustering: before clustering (improving input features), during clustering (by providing constraints to the clusterer), and after clustering (using LLMs post-correction). We find that incorporating LLMs in the first two stages routinely provides significant improvements in cluster quality, and that LLMs enable a user to make trade-offs between cost and accuracy to produce desired clusters. We release our code and LLM prompts for the public to use.1

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Better Synthetic Data by Retrieving and Transforming Existing Datasets
Saumya Gandhi | Ritu Gala | Vijay Viswanathan | Tongshuang Wu | Graham Neubig
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

Despite recent advances in large language models, building dependable and deployable NLP models typically requires abundant, high-quality training data. However, task-specific data is not available for many use cases, and manually curating task-specific data is labor-intensive. Recent work has studied prompt-driven synthetic data generation using large language models, but these generated datasets tend to lack complexity and diversity. To address these limitations, we introduce a method, _DataTune_, to make better use of existing, publicly available datasets to improve automatic dataset generation. DataTune performs _dataset transformation_, enabling the repurposing of publicly available datasets into a format that is directly aligned with the specific requirements of target tasks. On a diverse set of language-based tasks from the BIG-Bench benchmark, we find that finetuning language models via DataTune improves over a few-shot prompting baseline by 49% and improves over existing methods that use synthetic or retrieved training data by 34%. We find that dataset transformation significantly increases the diversity and difficulty of generated data on many tasks. We release a Python package and open-source repository to make this method accessible to the community (URL will be added upon acceptance).

2023

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DataFinder: Scientific Dataset Recommendation from Natural Language Descriptions
Vijay Viswanathan | Luyu Gao | Tongshuang Wu | Pengfei Liu | Graham Neubig
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Modern machine learning relies on datasets to develop and validate research ideas. Given the growth of publicly available data, finding the right dataset to use is increasingly difficult. Any research question imposes explicit and implicit constraints on how well a given dataset will enable researchers to answer this question, such as dataset size, modality, and domain. We operationalize the task of recommending datasets given a short natural language description of a research idea, to help people find relevant datasets for their needs. Dataset recommendation poses unique challenges as an information retrieval problem; datasets are hard to directly index for search and there are no corpora readily available for this task. To facilitate this task, we build the DataFinder Dataset which consists of a larger automatically-constructed training set (17.5K queries) and a smaller expert-annotated evaluation set (392 queries). Using this data, we compare various information retrieval algorithms on our test set and present a superior bi-encoder retriever for text-based dataset recommendation. This system, trained on the DataFinder Dataset, finds more relevant search results than existing third-party dataset search engines. To encourage progress on dataset recommendation, we release our dataset and models to the public.

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Prompt2Model: Generating Deployable Models from Natural Language Instructions
Vijay Viswanathan | Chenyang Zhao | Amanda Bertsch | Tongshuang Wu | Graham Neubig
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Large language models (LLMs) enable system builders today to create competent NLP systems through prompting, where they only need to describe the task in natural language and provide a few examples. However, in other ways, LLMs are a step backward from traditional special-purpose NLP models; they require extensive computational resources for deployment and can be gated behind APIs. In this paper, we propose Prompt2Model, a general-purpose method that takes a natural language task description like the prompts provided to LLMs, and uses it to train a special-purpose model that is conducive to deployment. This is done through a multi-step process of retrieval of existing datasets and pretrained models, dataset generation using LLMs, and supervised fine-tuning on these retrieved and generated datasets. Over three tasks, we demonstrate that given the same few-shot prompt as input, Prompt2Model trains models that outperform the results of a strong LLM, gpt-3.5-turbo, by an average of 20% while being up to 700 times smaller. We also show that this data can be used to obtain reliable performance estimates of model performance, enabling model developers to assess model reliability before deployment. Prompt2Model is available open-source at https://github.com/neulab/prompt2model. Our demo video is posted at youtu.be/LYYQ_EhGd-Q.

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Measuring Adversarial Datasets
Yuanchen Bai | Raoyi Huang | Vijay Viswanathan | Tzu-Sheng Kuo | Tongshuang Wu
Proceedings of the ART of Safety: Workshop on Adversarial testing and Red-Teaming for generative AI

2022

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A Dataset for N-ary Relation Extraction of Drug Combinations
Aryeh Tiktinsky | Vijay Viswanathan | Danna Niezni | Dana Meron Azagury | Yosi Shamay | Hillel Taub-Tabib | Tom Hope | Yoav Goldberg
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Combination therapies have become the standard of care for diseases such as cancer, tuberculosis, malaria and HIV. However, the combinatorial set of available multi-drug treatments creates a challenge in identifying effective combination therapies available in a situation. To assist medical professionals in identifying beneficial drug-combinations, we construct an expert-annotated dataset for extracting information about the efficacy of drug combinations from the scientific literature. Beyond its practical utility, the dataset also presents a unique NLP challenge, as the first relation extraction dataset consisting of variable-length relations. Furthermore, the relations in this dataset predominantly require language understanding beyond the sentence level, adding to the challenge of this task. We provide a promising baseline model and identify clear areas for further improvement. We release our dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/drug-combo-extraction), code (https://github.com/allenai/drug-combo-extraction) and baseline models (https://huggingface.co/allenai/drug-combo-classifier-pubmedbert-dapt) publicly to encourage the NLP community to participate in this task.

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DataLab: A Platform for Data Analysis and Intervention
Yang Xiao | Jinlan Fu | Weizhe Yuan | Vijay Viswanathan | Zhoumianze Liu | Yixin Liu | Graham Neubig | Pengfei Liu
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

Despite data’s crucial role in machine learning, most existing tools and research tend to focus on systems on top of existing data rather than how to interpret and manipulate data. In this paper, we propose DataLab, a unified data-oriented platform that not only allows users to interactively analyze the characteristics of data but also provides a standardized interface so that many data processing operations can be provided within a unified interface. Additionally, in view of the ongoing surge in the proliferation of datasets, DataLab has features for dataset recommendation and global vision analysis that help researchers form a better view of the data ecosystem. So far, DataLab covers 1,300 datasets and 3,583 of its transformed version, where 313 datasets support different types of analysis (e.g., with respect to gender bias) with the help of 119M samples annotated by 318 feature functions. DataLab is under active development and will be supported going forward. We have released a web platform, web API, Python SDK, and PyPI published package, which hopefully, can meet the diverse needs of researchers.

2021

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CitationIE: Leveraging the Citation Graph for Scientific Information Extraction
Vijay Viswanathan | Graham Neubig | Pengfei Liu
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)

Automatically extracting key information from scientific documents has the potential to help scientists work more efficiently and accelerate the pace of scientific progress. Prior work has considered extracting document-level entity clusters and relations end-to-end from raw scientific text, which can improve literature search and help identify methods and materials for a given problem. Despite the importance of this task, most existing works on scientific information extraction (SciIE) consider extraction solely based on the content of an individual paper, without considering the paper’s place in the broader literature. In contrast to prior work, we augment our text representations by leveraging a complementary source of document context: the citation graph of referential links between citing and cited papers. On a test set of English-language scientific documents, we show that simple ways of utilizing the structure and content of the citation graph can each lead to significant gains in different scientific information extraction tasks. When these tasks are combined, we observe a sizable improvement in end-to-end information extraction over the state-of-the-art, suggesting the potential for future work along this direction. We release software tools to facilitate citation-aware SciIE development.