This is a lecture note for the course DS-GA 3001 <Natural Language Understanding with Distributed Representation> at the Center for Data Science , New York University in Fall, 2015. As the name of the course suggests, this lecture note introduces readers to a neural network based approach to natural language understand…
CERT improves language understanding by contrastively learning sentence-level semantics.
problem Lack of sentence-level semantics in existing pretraining tasks.
method Contrastive self-supervised learning at the sentence level using back-translation augmentations.
result CERT outperforms BERT on 7 out of 11 GLUE benchmark tasks, achieving the same performance as BERT on 2 tasks.
Humor is a unique and creative communicative behavior displayed during social interactions. It is produced in a multimodal manner, through the usage of words (text), gestures (vision) and prosodic cues (acoustic). Understanding humor from these three modalities falls within boundaries of multimodal language; a recent r…
lamBERT learns language and actions using multimodal BERT.
problem Learning language and actions in complex environments.
method Extending BERT to multimodal representation and integrating with reinforcement learning.
result lamBERT model achieved higher rewards in multitask and transfer settings.
Language model benchmarks often misrepresent true understanding, revealing vulnerabilities in evaluation methods.
problem Language model benchmarks fail to accurately reflect true language understanding and adaptability.
method Systematic analysis of NLP evaluation frameworks, identifying vulnerabilities in static benchmarks, human evaluation protocols, and LLM-as-judge frameworks.
result Current evaluation methods are unreliable and need improvement to accurately assess LLM performance.
ZeroSCROLLS benchmarks zero-shot natural language understanding over long texts.
problem Evaluate natural language understanding models over long texts without training data.
method Adapt six tasks from SCROLLS benchmark and add four new datasets, including novel aggregation tasks.
result Claude outperforms ChatGPT, and GPT-4 achieves highest average score.
Optimus pre-trains sentences in a latent space for various NLP tasks.
problem Training large-scale language models for diverse NLP tasks.
method Pre-trained Variational Autoencoder (VAE) on large text corpus, fine-tuned for various tasks.
result Optimus achieves state-of-the-art on VAE language modeling benchmarks.
Genomic models learn DNA sequences to predict functions.
problem Understanding complex genetic interactions.
method Training LLMs on DNA sequences to predict functions.
result gLMs can predict functions of DNA elements.
Zero-shot understanding of accidents from surveillance videos using vision-language models
problem Accident understanding from surveillance videos
method Three-stage pipeline with vision-language similarity, metadata-driven multi-prompt reasoning, and entropy-gated pairwise adjudicator
result Substantial improvement in harmonic-mean score over baseline
Language grounded image understanding tasks have often been proposed as a method for evaluating progress in artificial intelligence. Ideally, these tasks should test a plethora of capabilities that integrate computer vision, reasoning, and natural language understanding. However, rather than behaving as visual Turing t…
Although deep convolutional networks have achieved improved performance in many natural language tasks, they have been treated as black boxes because they are difficult to interpret. Especially, little is known about how they represent language in their intermediate layers. In an attempt to understand the representatio…
TextHide secures language understanding tasks by adding minimal encryption.
problem Mitigating privacy risks in natural language understanding tasks.
method TextHide adds a simple encryption step to prevent data recovery.
result TextHide reduces accuracy loss by only 1.9% on GLUE benchmark.
Enhances drug discovery models by understanding human language.
problem Low predictive quality of activity prediction models in drug discovery.
method Proposes a novel architecture with separate chemical and natural language input modules and a contrastive pre-training objective.
result Improves predictive performance on few-shot and zero-shot learning benchmarks.
Improved financial sentiment analysis using simple instruction tuning of LLMs.
problem Lack of accurate financial sentiment analysis by large language models.
method Instruction tuning of general-purpose LLMs with a small portion of financial sentiment data.
result Significant improvement in financial sentiment analysis, especially in complex scenarios.
StakeBench evaluates language understanding by linking comments to market commitments, improving model alignment with real-world outcomes.
problem Existing financial NLP benchmarks measure perceived language rather than market commitments.
method StakeBench uses observable market behavior to supervise models, testing their ability to detect commitments, identify sides, and project odds.
result Models partially recover position-side signals but struggle with later tasks, highlighting structural failures.
Researchers analyze the structure of token spaces in large language models.
problem Understanding the geometric and topological structure of token spaces in large language models.
method Developed estimators for the dimension and Ricci scalar curvature of the token subspace and applied them to three large language models.
result The token subspace is not a manifold but a stratified manifold with significantly negative Ricci curvature.
Study shows LLMs can extrapolate rules from out-of-distribution prompts.
problem Understanding LLMs' ability to generalize from unexpected inputs.
method Formal languages and rule-based scenarios to evaluate LLMs' OOD behavior.
result LLMs can extrapolate rules from out-of-distribution prompts, even in complex scenarios.
AudioPaLM combines text and speech models to improve speech processing and translation.
problem Improving speech understanding and generation models.
method Unified multimodal architecture combining text and speech models.
result AudioPaLM significantly outperforms existing speech translation systems.
Improved text-to-image and multimodal understanding through adaptive generation order optimization.
problem Determining optimal generation sequences in text-to-image synthesis and multimodal understanding.
method Introduced a learnable control module trained via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to determine the generation order.
result Learning the control block substantially improves text-to-image alignment and multimodal understanding in DLMs.
Simple model outperforms neural networks on language understanding tasks.
problem Neural networks struggle with creating novel expressions from familiar ones.
method Attention-inspired modification of a baseline model, focusing on sequential thinking and acting.
result Simple model achieves good performance on gSCAN tasks, validating the benchmark.
We present a memory augmented neural network for natural language understanding: Neural Semantic Encoders. NSE is equipped with a novel memory update rule and has a variable sized encoding memory that evolves over time and maintains the understanding of input sequences through read}, compose and write operations. NSE c…
The paper studies how to improve language model inference using particle filtering.
problem Understanding the accuracy-cost tradeoffs of inference-time methods for large language models.
method Introduces particle filtering algorithms like Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) to study language model inference.
result Identifies criteria enabling non-asymptotic guarantees for SMC and fundamental limits faced by all particle filtering methods.
AttViz offers online visualizations of neural language model attention mechanisms.
problem Limited interpretability of neural language models.
method Online toolkit for exploring self-attention mechanisms.
result Visualizations help understand model decision-making.
RecoBERT uses a language model to recommend items from catalogs.
problem Harnessing language models for text-based item recommendations.
method RecoBERT is a BERT-based approach that learns specialized language models for item recommendations without requiring labeled data.
result RecoBERT outperforms other techniques in inferring item similarities from textual catalogs.
The study enhances financial rule matching using NLP without datasets.
problem Performing semantic matching between financial rules and policies.
method Outperforming pre-trained models with NLP techniques using free resources.
result Improved semantic matching between financial rules and policies.
Paper introduces NumLLM for better financial text understanding with numeric variables.
problem Poor performance of existing financial large language models in numeric financial text.
method Constructed financial corpus, fine-tuned with LoRA modules, merged into foundation model.
result NumLLM achieves best performance on financial question-answering benchmark, especially with numeric questions.
Prototype model improves model auditing and understanding.
problem Auditing and understanding modern language models is expensive and approximate.
method Introduced a sparse, non-negative mixture of learned prototypes trained with clustering objectives.
result Prototype models either surpass or remain within 2.5 percentage points of dense baselines on downstream tasks.
System identifies language of transliterated text.
problem Users struggle to understand non-native language transliterated text.
method Feature extraction of phonetic syllables using LSTM network.
result System accurately identifies language of transliterated text.
Typical spoken language understanding systems provide narrow semantic parses using a domain-specific ontology. The parses contain intents and slots that are directly consumed by downstream domain applications. In this work we discuss expanding such systems to handle compound entities and intents by introducing a domain…
Paper introduces a specialized text classification system for French Open Banking transactions.
problem Classifying specialized banking text data with high accuracy and efficiency.
method Data collection, labeling, preprocessing, modeling, and evaluation stages with language-specific techniques.
result Enhanced performance and efficiency compared to generic approaches.
A benchmark for NLP models trained on text datasets.
problem Limited access to high-performance clusters for NAS experiments.
method Created a search space for recurrent neural networks on text datasets and trained 14k architectures.
result Demonstrated the potential of precomputed NAS results for NLP.
Predicts language model performance from public models without training.
problem Understanding how language model performance varies with scale.
method Observational approach building scaling laws from publicly available models.
result Smooth, sigmoidal behavior of emergent phenomena is predictable from small models.
Paper proposes a deep learning model for understanding e-commerce addresses.
problem Challenges in parsing shipping addresses with no fixed format.
method Combines NLP techniques with pre-processing steps for addresses, uses RoBERTa for vector representations.
result RoBERTa model achieves 90% accuracy in sub-region classification for North and South Indian cities.
In this paper, we introduce an approach for leveraging available data across multiple locales sharing the same language to 1) improve domain classification model accuracy in Spoken Language Understanding and user experience even if new locales do not have sufficient data and 2) reduce the cost of scaling the domain cla…
Benchmark tests spoken language models for infant language learning.
problem Understanding how infants learn language from speech.
method Developed a language-acquisition-friendly benchmark.
result Benchmarking shows models' strengths and weaknesses.
LLMs improve financial sentiment analysis in finance.
problem Defining and measuring financial sentiment.
method Investigation of sentiment measurement methods and LLMs.
result LLMs enhance financial sentiment analysis.
Language models learn from training data and can leak private information.
problem Language models lack context understanding and can expose private data.
method Discussing the limitations of current privacy protection methods for language models.
result Existing privacy protection methods are insufficient for language models.
User interaction with voice-powered agents generates large amounts of unlabeled utterances. In this paper, we explore techniques to efficiently transfer the knowledge from these unlabeled utterances to improve model performance on Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) tasks. We use Embeddings from Language Model (ELMo) t…
MAC Net is a compositional attention network designed for Visual Question Answering. We propose a modified MAC net architecture for Natural Language Question Answering. Question Answering typically requires Language Understanding and multi-step Reasoning. MAC net's unique architecture - the separation between memory an…
With online calendar services gaining popularity worldwide, calendar data has become one of the richest context sources for understanding human behavior. However, event scheduling is still time-consuming even with the development of online calendars. Although machine learning based event scheduling models have automate…
Interactive Fiction games are text-based simulations in which an agent interacts with the world purely through natural language. They are ideal environments for studying how to extend reinforcement learning agents to meet the challenges of natural language understanding, partial observability, and action generation in …
Program comprehension is a fundamental task in software development and maintenance processes. Software developers often need to understand a large amount of existing code before they can develop new features or fix bugs in existing programs. Being able to process programming language code automatically and provide sum…
Recently, pre-trained language representation flourishes as the mainstay of the natural language understanding community, e.g., BERT. These pre-trained language representations can create state-of-the-art results on a wide range of downstream tasks. Along with continuous significant performance improvement, the size an…
Plex improves model reliability across vision and language tasks.
problem Improving model reliability in diverse decision-making tasks involving uncertainty and adaptation.
method Developed ViT-Plex and T5-Plex pretrained model extensions to evaluate and improve reliability across 40 datasets.
result Plex greatly improves state-of-the-art across reliability tasks, simplifying evaluation and performance.
The paper applies math and physics to language models, introducing entropy and geometric concepts.
problem Understanding and improving language models to approximate intelligent language.
method Formal definitions, functional analysis, topology, thermodynamics, and set theory.
result Entropy function reveals key obstacles for LLMs and offers insights into language models.
Theoretical analysis shows MDMs can be efficient but not for all metrics.
problem Understanding the efficiency-accuracy trade-off of diffusion language models.
method Theoretical analysis of Masked Diffusion Model (MDM) using perplexity and sequence error rate as metrics.
result MDM achieves near-optimal perplexity but requires linear scaling for sequence error rate, highlighting efficiency-accuracy trade-offs.
Study introduces KorFinMTEB for Korean financial texts, revealing model limitations.
problem Limited evaluation benchmarks for low-resource domains, especially Korean.
method Developed KorFinMTEB, a tailored benchmark for Korean financial texts.
result Models perform better on translated benchmarks than on domain-specific ones.
This paper explores NLP techniques for insurance, detailing methods and applications.
problem Extracting value from insurance reports using complex text data.
method Detailed explanation of NLP methods and their implementation in insurance.
result Enhanced risk monitoring and policyholder benefits through NLP.