Recognizing entities in texts is a central need in many information-seeking scenarios, and indeed, Named Entity Recognition (NER) is arguably one of the most successful examples of a widely adopted NLP task and corresponding NLP technology. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) appear to provide effective solutions (also) for NER tasks that were traditionally handled with dedicated models, often matching or surpassing the abilities of the dedicated models. Should NER be considered a solved problem? We argue to the contrary: the capabilities provided by LLMs are not the end of NER research, but rather an exciting beginning. They allow taking NER to the next level, tackling increasingly more useful, and increasingly more challenging, variants. We present three variants of the NER task, together with a dataset to support them. The first is a move towards more fine-grained -- and intersectional -- entity types. The second is a move towards zero-shot recognition and extraction of these fine-grained types based on entity-type labels. The third, and most challenging, is the move from the recognition setup to a novel retrieval setup, where the query is a zero-shot entity type, and the expected result is all the sentences from a large, pre-indexed corpus that contain entities of these types, and their corresponding spans. We show that all of these are far from being solved. We provide a large, silver-annotated corpus of 4 million paragraphs covering 500 entity types, to facilitate research towards all of these three goals.
With the recent spike in the number and availability of Large Language Models (LLMs), it has become increasingly important to provide large and realistic benchmarks for evaluating Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) systems. So far the majority of benchmarks rely on pattern-based SPARQL query generation approaches. The subsequent natural language (NL) question generation is conducted through crowdsourcing or other automated methods, such as rule-based paraphrasing or NL question templates. Although some of these datasets are of considerable size, their pitfall lies in their pattern-based generation approaches, which do not always generalize well to the vague and linguistically diverse questions asked by humans in real-world contexts. In this paper, we introduce Spider4SPARQL - a new SPARQL benchmark dataset featuring 9,693 previously existing manually generated NL questions and 4,721 unique, novel, and complex SPARQL queries of varying complexity. In addition to the NL/SPARQL pairs, we also provide their corresponding 166 knowledge graphs and ontologies, which cover 138 different domains. Our complex benchmark enables novel ways of evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of modern KGQA systems. We evaluate the system with state-of-the-art KGQA systems as well as LLMs, which achieve only up to 45\% execution accuracy, demonstrating that Spider4SPARQL is a challenging benchmark for future research.
In recent years, pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have achieved tremendous success in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Prior studies have primarily focused on general and generic domains, with relatively less research on specialized LLMs in the medical field. The specialization and high accuracy requirements for diagnosis in the medical field, as well as the challenges in collecting large-scale data, have constrained the application and development of LLMs in medical scenarios. In the field of ophthalmology, clinical diagnosis mainly relies on doctors' interpretation of reports and making diagnostic decisions. In order to take advantage of LLMs to provide decision support for doctors, we collected three modalities of ophthalmic report data and fine-tuned the LLaMA2 model, successfully constructing an LLM termed the "Ophtha-LLaMA2" specifically tailored for ophthalmic disease diagnosis. Inference test results show that even with a smaller fine-tuning dataset, Ophtha-LLaMA2 performs significantly better in ophthalmic diagnosis compared to other LLMs. It demonstrates that the Ophtha-LLaMA2 exhibits satisfying accuracy and efficiency in ophthalmic disease diagnosis, making it a valuable tool for ophthalmologists to provide improved diagnostic support for patients. This research provides a useful reference for the application of LLMs in the field of ophthalmology, while showcasing the immense potential and prospects in this domain.
This paper presents CyberSecEval, a comprehensive benchmark developed to help bolster the cybersecurity of Large Language Models (LLMs) employed as coding assistants. As what we believe to be the most extensive unified cybersecurity safety benchmark to date, CyberSecEval provides a thorough evaluation of LLMs in two crucial security domains: their propensity to generate insecure code and their level of compliance when asked to assist in cyberattacks. Through a case study involving seven models from the Llama 2, Code Llama, and OpenAI GPT large language model families, CyberSecEval effectively pinpointed key cybersecurity risks. More importantly, it offered practical insights for refining these models. A significant observation from the study was the tendency of more advanced models to suggest insecure code, highlighting the critical need for integrating security considerations in the development of sophisticated LLMs. CyberSecEval, with its automated test case generation and evaluation pipeline covers a broad scope and equips LLM designers and researchers with a tool to broadly measure and enhance the cybersecurity safety properties of LLMs, contributing to the development of more secure AI systems.
This study targets a critical aspect of multi-modal LLMs' (LLMs&VLMs) inference: explicit controllable text generation. Multi-modal LLMs empower multi-modality understanding with the capability of semantic generation yet bring less explainability and heavier reliance on prompt contents due to their autoregressive generative nature. While manipulating prompt formats could improve outputs, designing specific and precise prompts per task can be challenging and ineffective. To tackle this issue, we introduce a novel inference method, Prompt Highlighter, which enables users to highlight specific prompt spans to interactively control the focus during generation. Motivated by the classifier-free diffusion guidance, we form regular and unconditional context pairs based on highlighted tokens, demonstrating that the autoregressive generation in models can be guided in a classifier-free way. Notably, we find that, during inference, guiding the models with highlighted tokens through the attention weights leads to more desired outputs. Our approach is compatible with current LLMs and VLMs, achieving impressive customized generation results without training. Experiments confirm its effectiveness in focusing on input contexts and generating reliable content. Without tuning on LLaVA-v1.5, our method secured 69.5 in the MMBench test and 1552.5 in MME-perception. The code is available at: //github.com/dvlab-research/Prompt-Highlighter/
This paper presents an exhaustive quantitative and qualitative evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Knowledge Graph (KG) construction and reasoning. We employ eight distinct datasets that encompass aspects including entity, relation and event extraction, link prediction, and question answering. Empirically, our findings suggest that GPT-4 outperforms ChatGPT in the majority of tasks and even surpasses fine-tuned models in certain reasoning and question-answering datasets. Moreover, our investigation extends to the potential generalization ability of LLMs for information extraction, which culminates in the presentation of the Virtual Knowledge Extraction task and the development of the VINE dataset. Drawing on these empirical findings, we further propose AutoKG, a multi-agent-based approach employing LLMs for KG construction and reasoning, which aims to chart the future of this field and offer exciting opportunities for advancement. We anticipate that our research can provide invaluable insights for future undertakings of KG\footnote{Code and datasets will be available in //github.com/zjunlp/AutoKG.
Text Classification is the most essential and fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing. While numerous recent text classification models applied the sequential deep learning technique, graph neural network-based models can directly deal with complex structured text data and exploit global information. Many real text classification applications can be naturally cast into a graph, which captures words, documents, and corpus global features. In this survey, we bring the coverage of methods up to 2023, including corpus-level and document-level graph neural networks. We discuss each of these methods in detail, dealing with the graph construction mechanisms and the graph-based learning process. As well as the technological survey, we look at issues behind and future directions addressed in text classification using graph neural networks. We also cover datasets, evaluation metrics, and experiment design and present a summary of published performance on the publicly available benchmarks. Note that we present a comprehensive comparison between different techniques and identify the pros and cons of various evaluation metrics in this survey.
This paper presents a comprehensive and practical guide for practitioners and end-users working with Large Language Models (LLMs) in their downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. We provide discussions and insights into the usage of LLMs from the perspectives of models, data, and downstream tasks. Firstly, we offer an introduction and brief summary of current GPT- and BERT-style LLMs. Then, we discuss the influence of pre-training data, training data, and test data. Most importantly, we provide a detailed discussion about the use and non-use cases of large language models for various natural language processing tasks, such as knowledge-intensive tasks, traditional natural language understanding tasks, natural language generation tasks, emergent abilities, and considerations for specific tasks.We present various use cases and non-use cases to illustrate the practical applications and limitations of LLMs in real-world scenarios. We also try to understand the importance of data and the specific challenges associated with each NLP task. Furthermore, we explore the impact of spurious biases on LLMs and delve into other essential considerations, such as efficiency, cost, and latency, to ensure a comprehensive understanding of deploying LLMs in practice. This comprehensive guide aims to provide researchers and practitioners with valuable insights and best practices for working with LLMs, thereby enabling the successful implementation of these models in a wide range of NLP tasks. A curated list of practical guide resources of LLMs, regularly updated, can be found at \url{//github.com/Mooler0410/LLMsPracticalGuide}.
Large, pre-trained transformer-based language models such as BERT have drastically changed the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. We present a survey of recent work that uses these large language models to solve NLP tasks via pre-training then fine-tuning, prompting, or text generation approaches. We also present approaches that use pre-trained language models to generate data for training augmentation or other purposes. We conclude with discussions on limitations and suggested directions for future research.
Collecting supporting evidence from large corpora of text (e.g., Wikipedia) is of great challenge for open-domain Question Answering (QA). Especially, for multi-hop open-domain QA, scattered evidence pieces are required to be gathered together to support the answer extraction. In this paper, we propose a new retrieval target, hop, to collect the hidden reasoning evidence from Wikipedia for complex question answering. Specifically, the hop in this paper is defined as the combination of a hyperlink and the corresponding outbound link document. The hyperlink is encoded as the mention embedding which models the structured knowledge of how the outbound link entity is mentioned in the textual context, and the corresponding outbound link document is encoded as the document embedding representing the unstructured knowledge within it. Accordingly, we build HopRetriever which retrieves hops over Wikipedia to answer complex questions. Experiments on the HotpotQA dataset demonstrate that HopRetriever outperforms previously published evidence retrieval methods by large margins. Moreover, our approach also yields quantifiable interpretations of the evidence collection process.
Named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese is essential but difficult because of the lack of natural delimiters. Therefore, Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) is usually considered as the first step for Chinese NER. However, models based on word-level embeddings and lexicon features often suffer from segmentation errors and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In this paper, we investigate a Convolutional Attention Network called CAN for Chinese NER, which consists of a character-based convolutional neural network (CNN) with local-attention layer and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with global self-attention layer to capture the information from adjacent characters and sentence contexts. Also, compared to other models, not depending on any external resources like lexicons and employing small size of char embeddings make our model more practical. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods without word embedding and external lexicon resources on different domain datasets including Weibo, MSRA and Chinese Resume NER dataset.