Complex claim fact-checking performs a crucial role in disinformation detection. However, existing fact-checking methods struggle with claim vagueness, specifically in effectively handling latent information and complex relations within claims. Moreover, evidence redundancy, where non-essential information complicates the verification process, remains a significant issue. To tackle these limitations, we propose Bilateral Defusing Verification (BiDeV), a novel fact-checking working-flow framework integrating multiple role-played LLMs to mimic the human-expert fact-checking process. BiDeV consists of two main modules: Vagueness Defusing identifies latent information and resolves complex relations to simplify the claim, and Redundancy Defusing eliminates redundant content to enhance the evidence quality. Extensive experimental results on two widely used challenging fact-checking benchmarks (Hover and Feverous-s) demonstrate that our BiDeV can achieve the best performance under both gold and open settings. This highlights the effectiveness of BiDeV in handling complex claims and ensuring precise fact-checking.

In this paper, we propose contextualized and situated text-to-speech (CS-TTS), a novel TTS task to promote more accurate and customized speech generation using prompts with Dialogues, Narratives, and Actions (DNA). While prompt-based TTS methods facilitate controllable speech generation, existing TTS datasets lack situated descriptive prompts aligned with speech data. To address this data scarcity, we develop an automatic annotation pipeline enabling multifaceted alignment among speech clips, content text, and their respective descriptions. Based on this pipeline, we present DNASpeech, a novel CS-TTS dataset with high-quality speeches with DNA prompt annotations. DNASpeech contains 2,395 distinct characters, 4,452 scenes, and 22,975 dialogue utterances, along with over 18 hours of high-quality speech recordings. To accommodate more specific task scenarios, we establish a leaderboard featuring two new subtasks for evaluation: CS-TTS with narratives and CS-TTS with dialogues. We also design an intuitive baseline model for comparison with existing state-of-the-art TTS methods on our leaderboard. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the quality and effectiveness of DNASpeech, validating its potential to drive advancements in the TTS field.

Online recruitment platforms have reshaped job-seeking and recruiting processes, driving increased demand for applications that enhance person-job matching. Traditional methods generally rely on analyzing textual data from resumes and job descriptions, limiting the dynamic, interactive aspects crucial to effective recruitment. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revealed remarkable potential in simulating adaptive, role-based dialogues, making them well-suited for recruitment scenarios. In this paper, we propose MockLLM, a novel framework to generate and evaluate mock interview interactions. The system consists of two key components: mock interview generation and two-sided evaluation in handshake protocol. By simulating both interviewer and candidate roles, MockLLM enables consistent and collaborative interactions for real-time and two-sided matching. To further improve the matching quality, MockLLM further incorporates reflection memory generation and dynamic strategy modification, refining behaviors based on previous experience. We evaluate MockLLM on real-world data Boss Zhipin, a major Chinese recruitment platform. The experimental results indicate that MockLLM outperforms existing methods in matching accuracy, scalability, and adaptability across job domains, highlighting its potential to advance candidate assessment and online recruitment.

Mobile phone agents can assist people in automating daily tasks on their phones, which have emerged as a pivotal research spotlight. However, existing procedure-oriented agents struggle with cross-app instructions, due to the following challenges: (1) complex task relationships, (2) diverse app environment, and (3) error propagation and information loss in multi-step execution. Drawing inspiration from object-oriented programming principles, we recognize that object-oriented solutions is more suitable for cross-app instruction. To address these challenges, we propose a self-evolving multi-agent framework named MobileSteward which integrates multiple app-oriented StaffAgents coordinated by a centralized StewardAgent. We design three specialized modules in MobileSteward: (1) Dynamic Recruitment generates a scheduling graph guided by information flow to explicitly associate tasks among apps. (2) Assigned Execution assigns the task to app-oriented StaffAgents, each equipped with app-specialized expertise to address the diversity between apps. (3) Adjusted Evaluation conducts evaluation to provide reflection tips or deliver key information, which alleviates error propagation and information loss during multi-step execution. To continuously improve the performance of MobileSteward, we develop a Memory-based Self-evolution mechanism, which summarizes the experience from successful execution, to improve the performance of MobileSteward. We establish the first English Cross-APP Benchmark (CAPBench) in the real-world environment to evaluate the agents' capabilities of solving complex cross-app instructions. Experimental results demonstrate that MobileSteward achieves the best performance compared to both single-agent and multi-agent frameworks, highlighting the superiority of MobileSteward in better handling user instructions with diverse complexity.

Traditional drug discovery processes are both time-consuming and require extensive professional expertise. With the accumulation of drug-target interaction (DTI) data from experimental studies, leveraging modern machine-learning techniques to discern patterns between drugs and target proteins has become increasingly feasible. In this paper, we introduce the Multi-channel Interaction Network (MIN), a novel framework designed to predict DTIs through two primary components: a representation learning module and a multi-channel interaction module. The representation learning module features a C-Score Predictor-assisted screening mechanism, which selects critical residues to enhance prediction accuracy and reduce noise. The multi-channel interaction module incorporates a structure-agnostic channel, a structure-aware channel, and an extended-mixture channel, facilitating the identification of interaction patterns at various levels for optimal complementarity. Additionally, contrastive learning is utilized to harmonize the representations of diverse data types. Our experimental evaluations on public datasets demonstrate that MIN surpasses other strong DTI prediction methods. Furthermore, the case study reveals a high overlap between the residues selected by the C-Score Predictor and those in actual binding pockets, underscoring MIN's explainability capability. These findings affirm that MIN is not only a potent tool for DTI prediction but also offers fresh insights into the prediction of protein binding sites.

Electronic health records (EHRs) have become the foundation of machine learning applications in healthcare, while the utility of real patient records is often limited by privacy and security concerns. Synthetic EHR generation provides an additional perspective to compensate for this limitation. Most existing methods synthesize new records based on real EHR data, without consideration of different types of events in EHR data, which cannot control the event combinations in line with medical common sense. In this paper, we propose MSIC, a Multi-visit health Status Inference model for Collaborative EHR synthesis to address these limitations. First, we formulate the synthetic EHR generation process as a probabilistic graphical model and tightly connect different types of events by modeling the latent health states. Then, we derive a health state inference method tailored for the multi-visit scenario to effectively utilize previous records to synthesize current and future records. Furthermore, we propose to generate medical reports to add textual descriptions for each medical event, providing broader applications for synthesized EHR data. For generating different paragraphs in each visit, we incorporate a multi-generator deliberation framework to collaborate the message passing of multiple generators and employ a two-phase decoding strategy to generate high-quality reports. Our extensive experiments on the widely used benchmarks, MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV, demonstrate that MSIC advances state-of-the-art results on the quality of synthetic data while maintaining low privacy risks.

Shihan Deng, Weikai Xu, Hongda Sun, Wei Liu, Tao Tan, Jianfeng Liu, Ang Li, Jian Luan, Bin Wang, Rui Yan, Shuo Shang. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Hongda Sun, Weikai Xu, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Bin Wang, Shuo Shang, Ji-Rong Wen, Rui Yan. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Open-domain question answering (ODQA) has emerged as a pivotal research spotlight in information systems. Existing methods follow two main paradigms to collect evidence: (1) Theretrieve-then-read paradigm retrieves pertinent documents from an external corpus; and (2) thegenerate-then-read paradigm employs large language models (LLMs) to generate relevant documents. However, neither can fully address multifaceted requirements for evidence. To this end, we propose LLMQA, a generalized framework that formulates the ODQA process into three basic steps: query expansion, document selection, and answer generation, combining the superiority of both retrieval-based and generation-based evidence. Since LLMs exhibit their excellent capabilities to accomplish various tasks, we instruct LLMs to play multiple roles as generators, rerankers, and evaluators within our framework, integrating them to collaborate in the ODQA process. Furthermore, we introduce a novel prompt optimization algorithm to refine role-playing prompts and steer LLMs to produce higher-quality evidence and answers. Extensive experimental results on widely used benchmarks (NQ, WebQ, and TriviaQA) demonstrate that LLMQA achieves the best performance in terms of both answer accuracy and evidence quality, showcasing its potential for advancing ODQA research and applications.

Topic models have been thoroughly investigated for multiple years due to their great potential in analyzing and understanding texts. Recently, researchers combine the study of topic models with deep learning techniques, known as Neural Topic Models (NTMs). However, existing NTMs are mainly tested based on general document modeling without considering different textual analysis scenarios. We assume that there are different characteristics to model topics in different textual analysis tasks. In this paper, we propose a Conversational Neural Topic Model (ConvNTM) designed in particular for the conversational scenario. Unlike the general document topic modeling, a conversation session lasts for multiple turns: each short-text utterance complies with a single topic distribution and these topic distributions are dependent across turns. Moreover, there are roles in conversations, a.k.a., speakers and addressees. Topic distributions are partially determined by such roles in conversations. We take these factors into account to model topics in conversations via the multi-turn and multi-role formulation. We also leverage the word co-occurrence relationship as a new training objective to further improve topic quality. Comprehensive experimental results based on the benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed ConvNTM achieves the best performance both in topic modeling and in typical downstream tasks within conversational research (i.e., dialogue act classification and dialogue response generation).

AI-empowered drug recommendation has become an important task in healthcare research areas, which offers an additional perspective to assist human doctors with more accurate and more efficient drug prescriptions. Generally, drug recommendation is based on patients' diagnosis results in the electronic health records. We assume that there are three key factors to be addressed in drug recommendation: 1) elimination of recommendation bias due to limitations of observable information, 2) better utilization of historical health condition and 3) coordination of multiple drugs to control safety. To this end, we propose DrugRec, a causal inference based drug recommendation model. The causal graphical model can identify and deconfound the recommendation bias with front-door adjustment. Meanwhile, we model the multi-visit in the causal graph to characterize a patient's historical health conditions. Finally, we model the drug-drug interactions (DDIs) as the propositional satisfiability (SAT) problem, and solving the SAT problem can help better coordinate the recommendation. Comprehensive experiment results show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the widely used datasets MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV, demonstrating the effectiveness and safety of our method.

Stylized dialogue generation, which aims to generate a given-style response for an input context, plays a vital role in intelligent dialogue systems. Considering there is no parallel data between the contexts and the responses of target style S1, existing works mainly use back translation to generate stylized synthetic data for training, where the data about context, target style S1 and an intermediate style S0 is used. However, the interaction among these texts is not fully exploited, and the pseudo contexts are not adequately modeled. To overcome the above difficulties, we propose multi-pass dual learning (MPDL), which leverages the duality among the context, response of style S1 and response of style S_0. MPDL builds mappings among the above three domains, where the context should be reconstructed by the MPDL framework, and the reconstruction error is used as the training signal. To evaluate the quality of synthetic data, we also introduce discriminators that effectively measure how a pseudo sequence matches the specific domain, and the evaluation result is used as the weight for that data. Evaluation results indicate that our method obtains significant improvement over previous baselines.