Multi-News+: Cost-efficient Dataset Cleansing via LLM-based Data Annotation

The quality of the dataset is crucial for ensuring optimal performance and reliability of downstream task models. However, datasets often contain noisy data inadvertently included during the construction process. Numerous attempts have been made to correct this issue through human annotators. However, hiring and managing human annotators is expensive and time-consuming. As an alternative, recent studies are exploring the use of large language models (LLMs) for data annotation. In this study, we present a case study that extends the application of LLM-based data annotation to enhance the quality of existing datasets through a cleansing strategy. Specifically, we leverage approaches such as chain-of-thought (CoT) and majority voting to imitate human annotation and classify unrelated documents from the Multi-News dataset, which is widely used for the multi-document summarization task. Through our proposed cleansing method, we introduce an enhanced Multi-News+. By employing LLMs for data cleansing, we demonstrate an efficient and effective approach to improving dataset quality without relying on expensive human annotation efforts.

Enhancing Effectiveness and Robustness in a Low-Resource Regime via Decision-Boundary-aware Data Augmentation

Efforts to leverage deep learning models in low-resource regimes have led to numerous augmentation studies. However, the direct application of methods such as mixup and cutout to text data, is limited due to their discrete characteristics. While methods using pretrained language models have exhibited efficiency, they require additional considerations for robustness. Inspired by recent studies on decision boundaries, this paper proposes a decision-boundary-aware data augmentation strategy to enhance robustness using pretrained language models. The proposed technique first focuses on shifting the latent features closer to the decision boundary, followed by reconstruction to generate an ambiguous version with a soft label. Additionally, mid-K sampling is suggested to enhance the diversity of the generated sentences. This paper demonstrates the performance of the proposed augmentation strategy compared to other methods through extensive experiments. Furthermore, the ablation study reveals the effect of soft labels and mid-K sampling and the extensibility of the method with curriculum data augmentation.

GPTs Are Multilingual Annotators for Sequence Generation Tasks

Data annotation is an essential step for constructing new datasets. However, the conventional approach of data annotation through crowdsourcing is both time-consuming and expensive. In addition, the complexity of this process increases when dealing with low-resource languages owing to the difference in the language pool of crowdworkers. To address these issues, this study proposes an autonomous annotation method by utilizing large language models, which have been recently demonstrated to exhibit remarkable performance. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method is not just cost-efficient but also applicable for low-resource language annotation. Additionally, we constructed an image captioning dataset using our approach and are committed to open this dataset for future study. We have opened our source code for further study and reproducibility.

SoftEDA: Rethinking Rule-Based Data Augmentation with Soft Labels

Rule-based text data augmentation is widely used for NLP tasks due to its simplicity. However, this method can potentially damage the original meaning of the text, ultimately hurting the performance of the model. To overcome this limitation, we propose a straightforward technique for applying soft labels to augmented data. We conducted experiments across seven different classification tasks and empirically demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed approach. We have publicly opened our source code for reproducibility.

AutoAugment Is What You Need: Enhancing Rule-based Augmentation Methods in Low-resource Regimes

Text data augmentation is a complex problem due to the discrete nature of sentences. Although rule-based augmentation methods are widely adopted in real-world applications because of their simplicity, they suffer from potential semantic damage. Previous researchers have suggested easy data augmentation with soft labels (softEDA), employing label smoothing to mitigate this problem. However, finding the best factor for each model and dataset is challenging; therefore, using softEDA in real-world applications is still difficult. In this paper, we propose adapting AutoAugment to solve this problem. The experimental results suggest that the proposed method can boost existing augmentation methods and that rule-based methods can enhance cutting-edge pre-trained language models. We offer the source code.

Restoring and Mining the Records of the Joseon Dynasty via Neural Language Modeling and Machine Translation

Understanding voluminous historical records provides clues on the past in various aspects, such as social and political issues and even natural science facts. However, it is generally difficult to fully utilize the historical records, since most of the documents are not written in a modern language and part of the contents are damaged over time. As a result, restoring the damaged or unrecognizable parts as well as translating the records into modern languages are crucial tasks. In response, we present a multi-task learning approach to restore and translate historical documents based on a self-attention mechanism, specifically utilizing two Korean historical records, ones of the most voluminous historical records in the world. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves the accuracy of the translation task than baselines without multi-task learning. In addition, we present an in-depth exploratory analysis on our translated results via topic modeling, uncovering several significant historical events.