Few-shot table-to-text generation seeks to generate natural language descriptions for the given table in low-resource scenarios. Previous works mostly utilized Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) even Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate fluent descriptions of the tables. However, they are prone to hallucinations that do not conform to the table. In this work, we propose CoT-Planner, a simple but efficient Chain-of-Thoughts-based approach that can be used to reduce the generation of hallucinations in the few-shot table-to-text generation. We first use a LLM (such as ChatGPT) to automatically generate ten intermediate content plans in the form of a Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT) for each table and corresponding description pair. Then, we refined the most accurate content plan for each sample and used the table and text pairs with the added content plan (CoT-Plan) as demonstrations for In-Context Learning (ICL). Both automatic and human evaluations on the numericNLG dataset show our method can effectively alleviate hallucinations, thereby improving factual consistency in few-shot table-to-text generation. The code and data can be accessed from https://github.com/FXLP/CoT-Planner.

Relation extraction is an important task in the field of natural language processing. Previous works mainly focus on adopting pipeline methods or joint methods to model relation extraction in general scenarios. However, these existing methods face challenges when adapting to complex relation extraction scenarios, such as handling overlapped triplets, multiple triplets, and cross-sentence triplets. In this paper, we revisit the advantages and disadvantages of the aforementioned methods in complex relation extraction. Based on the in-depth analysis, we propose a novel two-stage bidirectional extract-then-evaluate framework namedBeeRe. In the extraction stage, we first obtain the subject set, relation set, and object set. Then, we design subject- and object-oriented triplet extractors to iteratively recurrent obtain candidate triplets, ensuring high recall. In the evaluation stage, we adopt a relation-oriented triplet filter to determine subject-object pairs based on relations in triplets obtained in the first stage, ensuring high precision. We conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets to show thatBeeReachieves state-of-the-art performance in both complex and general relation extraction scenarios. Even when compared to large language models like closed-source/open-source LLMs,BeeRestill has significant performance gains.

Abstract Effort‐Aware Defect Prediction (EADP) methods sort software modules based on the defect density and guide the testing team to inspect the modules with high defect density first. Previous studies indicated that some feature selection methods could improve the performance of Classification‐Based Defect Prediction (CBDP) models, and the Correlation‐based feature subset selection method with the Best First strategy (CorBF) performed the best. However, the practical benefits of feature selection methods on EADP performance are still unknown, and blindly employing the best‐performing CorBF method in CBDP to pre‐process the defect datasets may not improve the performance of EADP models but possibly result in performance degradation. To assess the impact of the feature selection techniques on EADP, a total of 24 feature selection methods with 10 classifiers embedded in a state‐of‐the‐art EADP model (CBS+) on the 41 PROMISE defect datasets were examined. We employ six evaluation metrics to assess the performance of EADP models comprehensively. The results show that (1) The impact of the feature selection methods varies in classifiers and datasets. (2) The four wrapper‐based feature subset selection methods with forwards search, that is, AdaBoost with Forwards Search, Deep Forest with Forwards Search, Random Forest with Forwards Search, and XGBoost with Forwards Search (XGBF) are better than other methods across the studied classifiers and the used datasets. And XGBF with XGBoost as the embedded classifier in CBS+ performs the best on the datasets. (3) The best‐performing CorBF method in CBDP does not perform well on the EADP task. (4) The selected features vary with different feature selection methods and different datasets, and the features noc (number of children), ic (inheritance coupling), cbo (coupling between object classes), and cbm (coupling between methods) are frequently selected by the four wrapper‐based feature subset selection methods with forwards search. (5) Using AdaBoost, deep forest, random forest, and XGBoost as the base classifiers embedded in CBS+ can achieve the best performance. In summary, we recommend the software testing team should employ XGBF with XGBoost as the embedded classifier in CBS+ to enhance the EADP performance.