SCITAT: A Question Answering Benchmark for Scientific Tables and Text Covering Diverse Reasoning Types

Scientific question answering (SQA) is an important task aimed at answering questions based on papers. However, current SQA datasets have limited reasoning types and neglect the relevance between tables and text, creating a significant gap with real scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a QA benchmark for scientific tables and text with diverse reasoning types (SciTaT). To cover more reasoning types, we summarize various reasoning types from real-world questions. To involve both tables and text, we require the questions to incorporate tables and text as much as possible. Based on SciTaT, we propose a strong baseline (CaR), which combines various reasoning methods to address different reasoning types and process tables and text at the same time. CaR brings average improvements of 12.9% over other baselines on SciTaT, validating its effectiveness. Error analysis reveals the challenges of SciTaT, such as complex numerical calculations and domain knowledge.

GTransPDM: A Graph-embedded Transformer with Positional Decoupling for Pedestrian Crossing Intention Prediction

Understanding and predicting pedestrian crossing behavioral intention is crucial for autonomous vehicles driving safety. Nonetheless, challenges emerge when using promising images or environmental context masks to extract various factors for time-series network modeling, causing pre-processing errors or a loss in efficiency. Typically, pedestrian positions captured by onboard cameras are often distorted and do not accurately reflect their actual movements. To address these issues, GTransPDM -- a Graph-embedded Transformer with a Position Decoupling Module -- was developed for pedestrian crossing intention prediction by leveraging multi-modal features. First, a positional decoupling module was proposed to decompose the pedestrian lateral movement and simulate depth variations in the image view. Then, a graph-embedded Transformer was designed to capture the spatial-temporal dynamics of human pose skeletons, integrating essential factors such as position, skeleton, and ego-vehicle motion. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves 92% accuracy on the PIE dataset and 87% accuracy on the JAAD dataset, with a processing speed of 0.05ms. It outperforms the state-of-the-art in comparison.

FLEXTAF: Enhancing Table Reasoning with Flexible Tabular Formats

The table reasoning task aims to answer the question according to the given table. Currently, using Large Language Models (LLMs) is the predominant method for table reasoning. Most existing methods employ a fixed tabular format to represent the table, which could limit the performance. Given that each instance requires different capabilities and models possess varying abilities, we assert that different instances and models suit different tabular formats. We prove the aforementioned claim through quantitative analysis of experimental results, where different instances and models achieve different performances using various tabular formats. Building on this discussion, we propose FLEXTAF-Single and FLEXTAF-Vote to enhance table reasoning performance by employing flexible tabular formats. Specifically, (i) FLEXTAF-Single trains a classifier to predict the most suitable tabular format based on the instance and the LLM. (ii) FLEXTAF-Vote integrates the results across different formats. Our experiments on WikiTableQuestions and TabFact reveal significant improvements, with average gains of 2.3% and 4.8% compared to the best performance achieved using a fixed tabular format with greedy decoding and self-consistency decoding, thereby validating the effectiveness of our methods.

SparkRA: A Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Service System Based on Spark Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable achievements across various language tasks.To enhance the performance of LLMs in scientific literature services, we developed the scientific literature LLM (SciLit-LLM) through pre-training and supervised fine-tuning on scientific literature, building upon the iFLYTEK Spark LLM. Furthermore, we present a knowledge service system Spark Research Assistant (SparkRA) based on our SciLit-LLM. SparkRA is accessible online and provides three primary functions: literature investigation, paper reading, and academic writing. As of July 30, 2024, SparkRA has garnered over 50,000 registered users, with a total usage count exceeding 1.3 million.

LM-Combiner: A Contextual Rewriting Model for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction

Over-correction is a critical problem in Chinese grammatical error correction (CGEC) task. Recent work using model ensemble methods based on voting can effectively mitigate over-correction and improve the precision of the GEC system. However, these methods still require the output of several GEC systems and inevitably lead to reduced error recall. In this light, we propose the LM-Combiner, a rewriting model that can directly modify the over-correction of GEC system outputs without a model ensemble. Specifically, we train the model on an over-correction dataset constructed through the proposed K-fold cross inference method, which allows it to directly generate filtered sentences by combining the original and the over-corrected text. In the inference stage, we directly take the original sentences and the output results of other systems as input and then obtain the filtered sentences through LM-Combiner. Experiments on the FCGEC dataset show that our proposed method effectively alleviates the over-correction of the original system (+18.2 Precision) while ensuring the error recall remains unchanged. Besides, we find that LM-Combiner still has a good rewriting performance even with small parameters and few training data, and thus can cost-effectively mitigate the over-correction of black-box GEC systems (e.g., ChatGPT).

CSED: A Chinese Semantic Error Diagnosis Corpus

Recently, much Chinese text error correction work has focused on Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) and Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis (CGED). In contrast, little attention has been paid to the complicated problem of Chinese Semantic Error Diagnosis (CSED), which lacks relevant datasets. The study of semantic errors is important because they are very common and may lead to syntactic irregularities or even problems of comprehension. To investigate this, we build the CSED corpus, which includes two datasets. The one is for the CSED-Recognition (CSED-R) task. The other is for the CSED-Correction (CSED-C) task. Our annotation guarantees high-quality data through quality assurance mechanisms. Our experiments show that powerful pre-trained models perform poorly on this corpus. We also find that the CSED task is challenging, as evidenced by the fact that even humans receive a low score. This paper proposes syntax-aware models to specifically adapt to the CSED task. The experimental results show that the introduction of the syntax-aware approach is meaningful.

Overview of CTC 2021: Chinese Text Correction for Native Speakers

In this paper, we present an overview of the CTC 2021, a Chinese text correction task for native speakers. We give detailed descriptions of the task definition and the data for training as well as evaluation. We also summarize the approaches investigated by the participants of this task. We hope the data sets collected and annotated for this task can facilitate and expedite future development in this research area. Therefore, the pseudo training data, gold standards validation data, and entire leaderboard is publicly available online at https://destwang.github.io/CTC2021-explorer/.

Improving Pre-trained Language Models with Syntactic Dependency Prediction Task for Chinese Semantic Error Recognition

Existing Chinese text error detection mainly focuses on spelling and simple grammatical errors. These errors have been studied extensively and are relatively simple for humans. On the contrary, Chinese semantic errors are understudied and more complex that humans cannot easily recognize. The task of this paper is Chinese Semantic Error Recognition (CSER), a binary classification task to determine whether a sentence contains semantic errors. The current research has no effective method to solve this task. In this paper, we inherit the model structure of BERT and design several syntax-related pre-training tasks so that the model can learn syntactic knowledge. Our pre-training tasks consider both the directionality of the dependency structure and the diversity of the dependency relationship. Due to the lack of a published dataset for CSER, we build a high-quality dataset for CSER for the first time named Corpus of Chinese Linguistic Semantic Acceptability (CoCLSA). The experimental results on the CoCLSA show that our methods outperform universal pre-trained models and syntax-infused models.

CINO: A Chinese Minority Pre-trained Language Model

Multilingual pre-trained language models have shown impressive performance on cross-lingual tasks. It greatly facilitates the applications of natural language processing on low-resource languages. However, there are still some languages that the existing multilingual models do not perform well on. In this paper, we propose CINO (Chinese Minority Pre-trained Language Model), a multilingual pre-trained language model for Chinese minority languages. It covers Standard Chinese, Cantonese, and six other Chinese minority languages. To evaluate the cross-lingual ability of the multilingual models on the minority languages, we collect documents from Wikipedia and build a text classification dataset WCM (Wiki-Chinese-Minority). We test CINO on WCM and two other text classification tasks. Experiments show that CINO outperforms the baselines notably. The CINO model and the WCM dataset are available at http://cino.hfl-rc.com.

InterHT: Knowledge Graph Embeddings by Interaction between Head and Tail Entities

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models learn the representation of entities and relations in knowledge graphs. Distance-based methods show promising performance on link prediction task, which predicts the result by the distance between two entity representations. However, most of these methods represent the head entity and tail entity separately, which limits the model capacity. We propose a novel distance-based method named InterHT that allows the head and tail entities to interact better and get better entity representation. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves the best results on ogbl-wikikg2 dataset.