With the most advanced natural language processing and artificial intelligence approaches, effective summarization of long and multi-topic documents -- such as academic papers -- for readers from different domains still remains a challenge. To address this, we introduce ConceptEVA, a mixed-initiative approach to generate, evaluate, and customize summaries for long and multi-topic documents. ConceptEVA incorporates a custom multi-task longformer encoder decoder to summarize longer documents. Interactive visualizations of document concepts as a network reflecting both semantic relatedness and co-occurrence help users focus on concepts of interest. The user can select these concepts and automatically update the summary to emphasize them. We present two iterations of ConceptEVA evaluated through an expert review and a within-subjects study. We find that participants' satisfaction with customized summaries through ConceptEVA is higher than their own manually-generated summary, while incorporating critique into the summaries proved challenging. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for designing summarization systems incorporating mixed-initiative interactions.
To extend the scope of coding queries to more realistic settings, we propose ODEX, the first Open-Domain EXecution-based natural language (NL) to Python code generation dataset. ODEX has 945 NL-Code pairs spanning 79 diverse libraries, along with 1,707 human-written test cases for execution. Our NL-Code pairs are harvested from StackOverflow forums to encourage natural and practical coding queries. Moreover, ODEX supports four natural languages as intents, in English, Spanish, Japanese, and Russian. ODEX unveils intriguing behavioral differences among top-performing code language models (LM). While CODEX achieves better overall results, CODEGEN improves effectively via scaling -- CODEGEN 6.1B performs comparably with CODEX 12B. Both models show substantial gaps between open and closed domains, but CODEGEN gaps tend to decrease with model size while CODEX gaps increase. We release ODEX to facilitate research into open-domain problems for the code generation community.
Text-based personality computing (TPC) has gained many research interests in NLP. In this paper, we describe 15 challenges that we consider deserving the attention of the research community. These challenges are organized by the following topics: personality taxonomies, measurement quality, datasets, performance evaluation, modelling choices, as well as ethics and fairness. When addressing each challenge, not only do we combine perspectives from both NLP and social sciences, but also offer concrete suggestions. We hope to inspire more valid and reliable TPC research.
As multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems are increasingly deployed throughout society, it is imperative yet challenging for users to understand the emergent behaviors of MARL agents in complex environments. This work presents an approach for generating policy-level contrastive explanations for MARL to answer a temporal user query, which specifies a sequence of tasks completed by agents with possible cooperation. The proposed approach encodes the temporal query as a PCTL logic formula and checks if the query is feasible under a given MARL policy via probabilistic model checking. Such explanations can help reconcile discrepancies between the actual and anticipated multi-agent behaviors. The proposed approach also generates correct and complete explanations to pinpoint reasons that make a user query infeasible. We have successfully applied the proposed approach to four benchmark MARL domains (up to 9 agents in one domain). Moreover, the results of a user study show that the generated explanations significantly improve user performance and satisfaction.
Despite the great development of document summarisation techniques nowadays, factual inconsistencies between the generated summaries and the original texts still occur from time to time. This study explores the possibility of adopting prompts to incorporate factual knowledge into generated summaries. We specifically study prefix-tuning that uses a set of trainable continuous prefix prompts together with discrete natural language prompts to aid summary generation. Experimental results demonstrate that the trainable prefixes can help the summarisation model extract information from discrete prompts precisely, thus generating knowledge-preserving summaries that are factually consistent with the discrete prompts. The ROUGE improvements of the generated summaries indicate that explicitly adding factual knowledge into the summarisation process could boost the overall performance, showing great potential for applying it to other natural language processing tasks.
Recommendation systems have become popular and effective tools to help users discover their interesting items by modeling the user preference and item property based on implicit interactions (e.g., purchasing and clicking). Humans perceive the world by processing the modality signals (e.g., audio, text and image), which inspired researchers to build a recommender system that can understand and interpret data from different modalities. Those models could capture the hidden relations between different modalities and possibly recover the complementary information which can not be captured by a uni-modal approach and implicit interactions. The goal of this survey is to provide a comprehensive review of the recent research efforts on the multimodal recommendation. Specifically, it shows a clear pipeline with commonly used techniques in each step and classifies the models by the methods used. Additionally, a code framework has been designed that helps researchers new in this area to understand the principles and techniques, and easily runs the SOTA models. Our framework is located at: //github.com/enoche/MMRec
Some neurons in deep networks specialize in recognizing highly specific perceptual, structural, or semantic features of inputs. In computer vision, techniques exist for identifying neurons that respond to individual concept categories like colors, textures, and object classes. But these techniques are limited in scope, labeling only a small subset of neurons and behaviors in any network. Is a richer characterization of neuron-level computation possible? We introduce a procedure (called MILAN, for mutual-information-guided linguistic annotation of neurons) that automatically labels neurons with open-ended, compositional, natural language descriptions. Given a neuron, MILAN generates a description by searching for a natural language string that maximizes pointwise mutual information with the image regions in which the neuron is active. MILAN produces fine-grained descriptions that capture categorical, relational, and logical structure in learned features. These descriptions obtain high agreement with human-generated feature descriptions across a diverse set of model architectures and tasks, and can aid in understanding and controlling learned models. We highlight three applications of natural language neuron descriptions. First, we use MILAN for analysis, characterizing the distribution and importance of neurons selective for attribute, category, and relational information in vision models. Second, we use MILAN for auditing, surfacing neurons sensitive to protected categories like race and gender in models trained on datasets intended to obscure these features. Finally, we use MILAN for editing, improving robustness in an image classifier by deleting neurons sensitive to text features spuriously correlated with class labels.
Temporal sentence grounding in videos (TSGV), a.k.a., natural language video localization (NLVL) or video moment retrieval (VMR), aims to retrieve a temporal moment that semantically corresponds to a language query from an untrimmed video. Connecting computer vision and natural language, TSGV has drawn significant attention from researchers in both communities. This survey attempts to provide a summary of fundamental concepts in TSGV and current research status, as well as future research directions. As the background, we present a common structure of functional components in TSGV, in a tutorial style: from feature extraction from raw video and language query, to answer prediction of the target moment. Then we review the techniques for multimodal understanding and interaction, which is the key focus of TSGV for effective alignment between the two modalities. We construct a taxonomy of TSGV techniques and elaborate methods in different categories with their strengths and weaknesses. Lastly, we discuss issues with the current TSGV research and share our insights about promising research directions.
The new era of technology has brought us to the point where it is convenient for people to share their opinions over an abundance of platforms. These platforms have a provision for the users to express themselves in multiple forms of representations, including text, images, videos, and audio. This, however, makes it difficult for users to obtain all the key information about a topic, making the task of automatic multi-modal summarization (MMS) essential. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the existing research in the area of MMS.
The goal of text generation is to make machines express in human language. It is one of the most important yet challenging tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Since 2014, various neural encoder-decoder models pioneered by Seq2Seq have been proposed to achieve the goal by learning to map input text to output text. However, the input text alone often provides limited knowledge to generate the desired output, so the performance of text generation is still far from satisfaction in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, researchers have considered incorporating various forms of knowledge beyond the input text into the generation models. This research direction is known as knowledge-enhanced text generation. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of the research on knowledge enhanced text generation over the past five years. The main content includes two parts: (i) general methods and architectures for integrating knowledge into text generation; (ii) specific techniques and applications according to different forms of knowledge data. This survey can have broad audiences, researchers and practitioners, in academia and industry.
Search in social networks such as Facebook poses different challenges than in classical web search: besides the query text, it is important to take into account the searcher's context to provide relevant results. Their social graph is an integral part of this context and is a unique aspect of Facebook search. While embedding-based retrieval (EBR) has been applied in eb search engines for years, Facebook search was still mainly based on a Boolean matching model. In this paper, we discuss the techniques for applying EBR to a Facebook Search system. We introduce the unified embedding framework developed to model semantic embeddings for personalized search, and the system to serve embedding-based retrieval in a typical search system based on an inverted index. We discuss various tricks and experiences on end-to-end optimization of the whole system, including ANN parameter tuning and full-stack optimization. Finally, we present our progress on two selected advanced topics about modeling. We evaluated EBR on verticals for Facebook Search with significant metrics gains observed in online A/B experiments. We believe this paper will provide useful insights and experiences to help people on developing embedding-based retrieval systems in search engines.