Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive abilities in generating unstructured natural language according to instructions. However, their performance can be inconsistent when tasked with producing text that adheres to specific structured formats, which is crucial in applications like named entity recognition (NER) or relation extraction (RE). To address this issue, this paper introduces an efficient method, G&O, to enhance their structured text generation capabilities. It breaks the generation into a two-step pipeline: initially, LLMs generate answers in natural language as intermediate responses. Subsequently, LLMs are asked to organize the output into the desired structure, using the intermediate responses as context. G&O effectively separates the generation of content from the structuring process, reducing the pressure of completing two orthogonal tasks simultaneously. Tested on zero-shot NER and RE, the results indicate a significant improvement in LLM performance with minimal additional efforts. This straightforward and adaptable prompting technique can also be combined with other strategies, like self-consistency, to further elevate LLM capabilities in various structured text generation tasks.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, a powerful AI Chatbot developed by OpenAI, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in both academia and industry, bringing about a fundamental engineering paradigm shift in many areas. While LLMs are powerful, it is also crucial to best use their power where "prompt'' plays a core role. However, the booming LLMs themselves, including excellent APIs like ChatGPT, have several inherent limitations: 1) temporal lag of training data, and 2) the lack of physical capabilities to perform external actions. Recently, we have observed the trend of utilizing prompt-based tools to better utilize the power of LLMs for downstream tasks, but a lack of systematic literature and standardized terminology, partly due to the rapid evolution of this field. Therefore, in this work, we survey related prompting tools and promote the concept of the "Prompting Framework" (PF), i.e. the framework for managing, simplifying, and facilitating interaction with large language models. We define the lifecycle of the PF as a hierarchical structure, from bottom to top, namely: Data Level, Base Level, Execute Level, and Service Level. We also systematically depict the overall landscape of the emerging PF field and discuss potential future research and challenges. To continuously track the developments in this area, we maintain a repository at //github.com/lxx0628/Prompting-Framework-Survey, which can be a useful resource sharing platform for both academic and industry in this field.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing. However, their internal mechanisms are still unclear and this lack of transparency poses unwanted risks for downstream applications. Therefore, understanding and explaining these models is crucial for elucidating their behaviors, limitations, and social impacts. In this paper, we introduce a taxonomy of explainability techniques and provide a structured overview of methods for explaining Transformer-based language models. We categorize techniques based on the training paradigms of LLMs: traditional fine-tuning-based paradigm and prompting-based paradigm. For each paradigm, we summarize the goals and dominant approaches for generating local explanations of individual predictions and global explanations of overall model knowledge. We also discuss metrics for evaluating generated explanations, and discuss how explanations can be leveraged to debug models and improve performance. Lastly, we examine key challenges and emerging opportunities for explanation techniques in the era of LLMs in comparison to conventional machine learning models.
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. The great promise of LLMs as general task solvers motivated people to extend their functionality largely beyond just a ``chatbot'', and use it as an assistant or even replacement for domain experts and tools in specific domains such as healthcare, finance, and education. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of domain data, the sophistication of domain knowledge, the uniqueness of domain objectives, and the diversity of the constraints (e.g., various social norms, cultural conformity, religious beliefs, and ethical standards in the domain applications). To fill such a gap, explosively-increase research, and practices have been conducted in very recent years on the domain specialization of LLMs, which, however, calls for a comprehensive and systematic review to better summarizes and guide this promising domain. In this survey paper, first, we propose a systematic taxonomy that categorizes the LLM domain-specialization techniques based on the accessibility to LLMs and summarizes the framework for all the subcategories as well as their relations and differences to each other. We also present a comprehensive taxonomy of critical application domains that can benefit from specialized LLMs, discussing their practical significance and open challenges. Furthermore, we offer insights into the current research status and future trends in this area.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP) with their impressive language understanding and generation capabilities. However, their performance may be suboptimal for long-tail or domain-specific tasks due to limited exposure to domain-specific knowledge and vocabulary. Additionally, the lack of transparency of most state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs, which can only be accessed via APIs, impedes further fine-tuning with custom data. Moreover, data privacy is a significant concern. To address these challenges, we propose the novel Parametric Knowledge Guiding (PKG) framework, which equips LLMs with a knowledge-guiding module to access relevant knowledge at runtime without altering the LLMs' parameters. Our PKG is based on open-source "white-box" small language models, allowing offline storage of any knowledge that LLMs require. We demonstrate that our PKG framework can enhance the performance of "black-box" LLMs on a range of long-tail and domain-specific downstream tasks requiring factual, tabular, medical, and multimodal knowledge.
Translational distance-based knowledge graph embedding has shown progressive improvements on the link prediction task, from TransE to the latest state-of-the-art RotatE. However, N-1, 1-N and N-N predictions still remain challenging. In this work, we propose a novel translational distance-based approach for knowledge graph link prediction. The proposed method includes two-folds, first we extend the RotatE from 2D complex domain to high dimension space with orthogonal transforms to model relations for better modeling capacity. Second, the graph context is explicitly modeled via two directed context representations. These context representations are used as part of the distance scoring function to measure the plausibility of the triples during training and inference. The proposed approach effectively improves prediction accuracy on the difficult N-1, 1-N and N-N cases for knowledge graph link prediction task. The experimental results show that it achieves better performance on two benchmark data sets compared to the baseline RotatE, especially on data set (FB15k-237) with many high in-degree connection nodes.
Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to identify text spans that mention named entities, and to classify them into predefined categories such as person, location, organization etc. NER serves as the basis for a variety of natural language applications such as question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Although early NER systems are successful in producing decent recognition accuracy, they often require much human effort in carefully designing rules or features. In recent years, deep learning, empowered by continuous real-valued vector representations and semantic composition through nonlinear processing, has been employed in NER systems, yielding stat-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing deep learning techniques for NER. We first introduce NER resources, including tagged NER corpora and off-the-shelf NER tools. Then, we systematically categorize existing works based on a taxonomy along three axes: distributed representations for input, context encoder, and tag decoder. Next, we survey the most representative methods for recent applied techniques of deep learning in new NER problem settings and applications. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by NER systems and outline future directions in this area.
A sememe is defined as the minimum semantic unit of human languages. Sememe knowledge bases (KBs), which contain words annotated with sememes, have been successfully applied to many NLP tasks. However, existing sememe KBs are built on only a few languages, which hinders their widespread utilization. To address the issue, we propose to build a unified sememe KB for multiple languages based on BabelNet, a multilingual encyclopedic dictionary. We first build a dataset serving as the seed of the multilingual sememe KB. It manually annotates sememes for over $15$ thousand synsets (the entries of BabelNet). Then, we present a novel task of automatic sememe prediction for synsets, aiming to expand the seed dataset into a usable KB. We also propose two simple and effective models, which exploit different information of synsets. Finally, we conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore important factors and difficulties in the task. All the source code and data of this work can be obtained on //github.com/thunlp/BabelNet-Sememe-Prediction.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.
In order to answer natural language questions over knowledge graphs, most processing pipelines involve entity and relation linking. Traditionally, entity linking and relation linking has been performed either as dependent sequential tasks or independent parallel tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework called "EARL", which performs entity linking and relation linking as a joint single task. EARL uses a graph connection based solution to the problem. We model the linking task as an instance of the Generalised Travelling Salesman Problem (GTSP) and use GTSP approximate algorithm solutions. We later develop EARL which uses a pair-wise graph-distance based solution to the problem.The system determines the best semantic connection between all keywords of the question by referring to a knowledge graph. This is achieved by exploiting the "connection density" between entity candidates and relation candidates. The "connection density" based solution performs at par with the approximate GTSP solution.We have empirically evaluated the framework on a dataset with 5000 questions. Our system surpasses state-of-the-art scores for entity linking task by reporting an accuracy of 0.65 to 0.40 from the next best entity linker.