16 accepted papers
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of Natural Language Processing, but are computationally expensive. To reduce the cost without sacrificing performance, previous studies have explored various approaches to harness the potential of Smaller Language Models (SLMs) as cost-e…
Humans draw to facilitate reasoning: we draw auxiliary lines when solving geometry problems; we mark and circle when reasoning on maps; we use sketches to amplify our ideas and relieve our limited-capacity working memory. However, such actions are missing in current multimodal language models (LMs).…
Though end-to-end neural approaches have recently been dominating NLP tasks in both performance and ease-of-use, they lack interpretability and robustness. We propose Binder, a training-free neural-symbolic framework that maps the task input to a program, which (1) allows binding a unified API of la…
Language models (LMs) often exhibit undesirable text generation behaviors, including generating false, toxic, or irrelevant outputs. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)---where human preference judgments on LM outputs are transformed into a learning signal---has recently shown promise…
This paper <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> presents a novel system which utilizes acoustic, phonological, morphosyntactic, and prosodic information for binary automatic dialect detection of African American English. We train this…
We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedde…
Many recent approaches to natural language tasks are built on the remarkable abilities of large language models. Large language models can perform in-context learning, where they learn a new task from a few task demonstrations, without any parameter updates. This work examines the implications of in…
Despite thousands of researchers, engineers, and artists actively working on improving text-to-image generation models, systems often fail to produce images that accurately align with the text inputs. We introduce TIFA (Text-to-image Faithfulness evaluation with question Answering), an automatic eva…
Compared to standard retrieval tasks, passage retrieval for conversational question answering (CQA) poses new challenges in understanding the current user question, as each question needs to be interpreted within the dialogue context. Moreover, it can be expensive to re-train well-established retrie…
Collecting and annotating task-oriented dialogues is time-consuming and costly. Thus, zero and few shot learning for dialogue tasks presents an exciting opportunity. In this work, we propose an in-context (IC) learning framework for zero-shot and few-shot learning dialogue state tracking (DST), wher…
Human conversations can evolve in many different ways, creating challenges for automatic understanding and summarization. Goal-oriented conversations often have meaningful sub-dialogue structure, but it can be highly domain-dependent. This work introduces an unsupervised approach to learning hierarc…
Current end-to-end neural conversation models inherently lack the flexibility to impose semantic control in the response generation process, often resulting in uninteresting responses. Attempts to boost informativeness alone come at the expense of factual accuracy, as attested by pretrained language…
Identifying relevant knowledge to be used in conversational systems that are grounded in long documents is critical to effective response generation. We introduce a knowledge identification model that leverages the document structure to provide dialogue-contextualized passage encodings and better lo…
Task-oriented conversational systems often use dialogue state tracking to represent the user’s intentions, which involves filling in values of pre-defined slots. Many approaches have been proposed, often using task-specific architectures with special-purpose classifiers. Recently, good results have…
Max-pooling neural network architectures have been proven to be useful for keyword spotting (KWS), but standard training methods suffer from a class-imbalance problem when using all frames from negative utterances. To address the problem, we propose an innovative algorithm, Regional Hard-Example (RH…
In this paper, we propose a domain adversarial training (DAT) algorithm to alleviate the accented speech recognition problem. In order to reduce the mismatch between labeled source domain data (“standard” accent) and unlabeled target domain data (with heavy accents), we augment the learning objectiv…