Graph Linearization Methods for Reasoning on Graphs with Large Language Models

Large language models have evolved to process multiple modalities beyond text, such as images and audio, which motivates us to explore how to effectively leverage them for graph machine learning tasks. The key question, therefore, is how to transform graphs into linear sequences of tokens, a process we term graph linearization, so that LLMs can handle graphs naturally. We consider that graphs should be linearized meaningfully to reflect certain properties of natural language text, such as local dependency and global alignment, in order to ease contemporary LLMs, trained on trillions of textual tokens, better understand graphs. To achieve this, we developed several graph linearization methods based on graph centrality, degeneracy, and node relabeling schemes. We then investigated their effect on LLM performance in graph reasoning tasks. Experimental results on synthetic graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods compared to random linearization baselines. Our work introduces novel graph representations suitable for LLMs, contributing to the potential integration of graph machine learning with the trend of multi-modal processing using a unified transformer model.

Atlas-Chat: Adapting Large Language Models for Low-Resource Moroccan Arabic Dialect

We introduce Atlas-Chat, the first-ever collection of large language models specifically developed for dialectal Arabic. Focusing on Moroccan Arabic, also known as Darija, we construct our instruction dataset by consolidating existing Darija language resources, creating novel datasets both manually and synthetically, and translating English instructions with stringent quality control. Atlas-Chat-9B and 2B models, fine-tuned on the dataset, exhibit superior ability in following Darija instructions and performing standard NLP tasks. Notably, our models outperform both state-of-the-art and Arabic-specialized LLMs like LLaMa, Jais, and AceGPT, e.g., achieving a 13% performance boost over a larger 13B model on DarijaMMLU, in our newly introduced evaluation suite for Darija covering both discriminative and generative tasks. Furthermore, we perform an experimental analysis of various fine-tuning strategies and base model choices to determine optimal configurations. All our resources are publicly accessible, and we believe our work offers comprehensive design methodologies of instruction-tuning for low-resource language variants, which are often neglected in favor of data-rich languages by contemporary LLMs.

Leveraging Discourse Structure for Extractive Meeting Summarization

We introduce an extractive summarization system for meetings that leverages discourse structure to better identify salient information from complex multi-party discussions. Using discourse graphs to represent semantic relations between the contents of utterances in a meeting, we train a GNN-based node classification model to select the most important utterances, which are then combined to create an extractive summary. Experimental results on AMI and ICSI demonstrate that our approach surpasses existing text-based and graph-based extractive summarization systems, as measured by both classification and summarization metrics. Additionally, we conduct ablation studies on discourse structure and relation type to provide insights for future NLP applications leveraging discourse analysis theory.

FREDSum: A Dialogue Summarization Corpus for French Political Debates

Recent advances in deep learning, and especially the invention of encoder-decoder architectures, has significantly improved the performance of abstractive summarization systems. The majority of research has focused on written documents, however, neglecting the problem of multi-party dialogue summarization. In this paper, we present a dataset of French political debates for the purpose of enhancing resources for multi-lingual dialogue summarization. Our dataset consists of manually transcribed and annotated political debates, covering a range of topics and perspectives. We highlight the importance of high quality transcription and annotations for training accurate and effective dialogue summarization models, and emphasize the need for multilingual resources to support dialogue summarization in non-English languages. We also provide baseline experiments using state-of-the-art methods, and encourage further research in this area to advance the field of dialogue summarization. Our dataset will be made publicly available for use by the research community.

The Claire French Dialogue Dataset

We present the Claire French Dialogue Dataset (CFDD), a resource created by members of LINAGORA Labs in the context of the OpenLLM France initiative. CFDD is a corpus containing roughly 160 million words from transcripts and stage plays in French that we have assembled and publicly released in an effort to further the development of multilingual, open source language models. This paper describes the 24 individual corpora of which CFDD is composed and provides links and citations to their original sources. It also provides our proposed breakdown of the full CFDD dataset into eight categories of subcorpora and describes the process we followed to standardize the format of the final dataset. We conclude with a discussion of similar work and future directions.

Automatic Analysis of Substantiation in Scientific Peer Reviews

With the increasing amount of problematic peer reviews in top AI conferences, the community is urgently in need of automatic quality control measures. In this paper, we restrict our attention to substantiation -- one popular quality aspect indicating whether the claims in a review are sufficiently supported by evidence -- and provide a solution automatizing this evaluation process. To achieve this goal, we first formulate the problem as claim-evidence pair extraction in scientific peer reviews, and collect SubstanReview, the first annotated dataset for this task. SubstanReview consists of 550 reviews from NLP conferences annotated by domain experts. On the basis of this dataset, we train an argument mining system to automatically analyze the level of substantiation in peer reviews. We also perform data analysis on the SubstanReview dataset to obtain meaningful insights on peer reviewing quality in NLP conferences over recent years.

The Curious Decline of Linguistic Diversity: Training Language Models on Synthetic Text

This study investigates the consequences of training large language models (LLMs) on synthetic data generated by their predecessors, an increasingly prevalent practice aimed at addressing the limited supply of human-generated training data. Diverging from the usual emphasis on performance metrics, we focus on the impact of this training methodology on linguistic diversity, especially when conducted recursively over time. To assess this, we developed a set of novel metrics targeting lexical, syntactic, and semantic diversity, applying them in recursive fine-tuning experiments across various natural language generation tasks. Our findings reveal a marked decrease in the diversity of the models' outputs through successive iterations. This trend underscores the potential risks of training LLMs on predecessor-generated text, particularly concerning the preservation of linguistic richness. Our study highlights the need for careful consideration of the long-term effects of such training approaches on the linguistic capabilities of LLMs.

DATScore: Evaluating Translation with Data Augmented Translations

The rapid development of large pretrained language models has revolutionized not only the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG) but also its evaluation. Inspired by the recent work of BARTScore: a metric leveraging the BART language model to evaluate the quality of generated text from various aspects, we introduce DATScore. DATScore uses data augmentation techniques to improve the evaluation of machine translation. Our main finding is that introducing data augmented translations of the source and reference texts is greatly helpful in evaluating the quality of the generated translation. We also propose two novel score averaging and term weighting strategies to improve the original score computing process of BARTScore. Experimental results on WMT show that DATScore correlates better with human meta-evaluations than the other recent state-of-the-art metrics, especially for low-resource languages. Ablation studies demonstrate the value added by our new scoring strategies. Moreover, we report in our extended experiments the performance of DATScore on 3 NLG tasks other than translation.

Abstractive Meeting Summarization: A Survey

Recent advances in deep learning, and especially the invention of encoder-decoder architectures, has significantly improved the performance of abstractive summarization systems. While the majority of research has focused on written documents, we have observed an increasing interest in the summarization of dialogues and multi-party conversation over the past few years. A system that could reliably transform the audio or transcript of a human conversation into an abridged version that homes in on the most important points of the discussion would be valuable in a wide variety of real-world contexts, from business meetings to medical consultations to customer service calls. This paper focuses on abstractive summarization for multi-party meetings, providing a survey of the challenges, datasets and systems relevant to this task and a discussion of promising directions for future study.

NLP Research and Resources at DaSciM, Ecole Polytechnique

DaSciM (Data Science and Mining) part of LIX at Ecole Polytechnique, established in 2013 and since then producing research results in the area of large scale data analysis via methods of machine and deep learning. The group has been specifically active in the area of NLP and text mining with interesting results at methodological and resources level. Here follow our different contributions of interest to the AFIA community.