Reward models have become a staple in modern NLP, serving as not only a scalable text evaluator, but also an indispensable component in many alignment recipes and inference-time algorithms.However, while recent reward models increase performance on standard benchmarks, this may partly be due to overfitting effects, which would confound an understanding of their true capability.In this work, we scrutinize the robustness of reward models and the extent of such overfitting.We build re-WordBench, which systematically transforms reward model inputs in meaning-or rankingpreserving ways.We show that state-of-theart reward models suffer from substantial performance degradation even with minor input transformations, sometimes dropping to significantly below-random accuracy, suggesting brittleness.To improve reward model robustness, we propose to explicitly train them to assign similar scores to paraphrases, and find that this approach also improves robustness to other distinct kinds of transformations.For example, our robust reward model reduces such degradation by roughly half for the Chat Hard subset in RewardBench.Furthermore, when used in alignment, our robust reward models demonstrate better utility and lead to higher-quality outputs, winning in up to 59% of instances against a standardly trained RM.

We introduce Transfusion, a recipe for training a multi-modal model over discrete and continuous data. Transfusion combines the language modeling loss function (next token prediction) with diffusion to train a single transformer over mixed-modality sequences. We pretrain multiple Transfusion models up to 7B parameters from scratch on a mixture of text and image data, establishing scaling laws with respect to a variety of uni- and cross-modal benchmarks. Our experiments show that Transfusion scales significantly better than quantizing images and training a language model over discrete image tokens. By introducing modality-specific encoding and decoding layers, we can further improve the performance of Transfusion models, and even compress each image to just 16 patches. We further demonstrate that scaling our Transfusion recipe to 7B parameters and 2T multi-modal tokens produces a model that can generate images and text on a par with similar scale diffusion models and language models, reaping the benefits of both worlds.

Most existing image tokenizers encode images into a fixed number of tokens or patches, overlooking the inherent variability in image complexity and introducing unnecessary computate overhead for simpler images. To address this, we propose Content-Adaptive Tokenizer (CAT), which dynamically adjusts representation capacity based on the image content and encodes simpler images into fewer tokens. We design (1) a caption-based evaluation system that leverages LLMs to predict content complexity and determine the optimal compression ratio for an image, and (2) a novel nested VAE architecture that performs variable-rate compression in a single model. Trained on images with varying complexity, CAT achieves an average of 15% reduction in rFID across seven detail-rich datasets containing text, humans, and complex textures. On natural image datasets like ImageNet and COCO, it reduces token usage by 18% while maintaining high-fidelity reconstructions. We further evaluate CAT on two downstream tasks. For image classification, CAT consistently improves top-1 accuracy across five datasets spanning diverse domains. For image generation, it boosts training throughput by 23% on ImageNet, leading to more efficient learning and improved FIDs over fixed-token baselines.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting for language models demonstrates impressive performance across reasoning tasks, but typically needs labeled exemplars of the reasoning process. In this work, we introduce a new prompting approach, analogical prompting, designed to automatically guide the reasoning process of large language models. Inspired by analogical reasoning, a cognitive process in which humans draw from relevant past experiences to tackle new problems, our approach prompts language models to self-generate relevant exemplars or knowledge in the context, before proceeding to solve the given problem. This method presents several advantages: it obviates the need for labeling or retrieving exemplars, offering generality and convenience; it can also tailor the generated exemplars and knowledge to each problem, offering adaptability. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms 0-shot CoT and manual few-shot CoT in a variety of reasoning tasks, including math problem solving in GSM8K and MATH, code generation in Codeforces, and other reasoning tasks in BIG-Bench.

Weijia Shi, Sewon Min, Michihiro Yasunaga, Minjoon Seo, Richard James, Mike Lewis, Luke Zettlemoyer, Wen-tau Yih. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

In order to thrive in hostile and ever-changing natural environments, mammalian brains evolved to store large amounts of knowledge about the world and continually integrate new information while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Despite the impressive accomplishments, large language models (LLMs), even with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), still struggle to efficiently and effectively integrate a large amount of new experiences after pre-training. In this work, we introduce HippoRAG, a novel retrieval framework inspired by the hippocampal indexing theory of human long-term memory to enable deeper and more efficient knowledge integration over new experiences. HippoRAG synergistically orchestrates LLMs, knowledge graphs, and the Personalized PageRank algorithm to mimic the different roles of neocortex and hippocampus in human memory. We compare HippoRAG with existing RAG methods on multi-hop question answering (QA) and show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods remarkably, by up to 20%. Single-step retrieval with HippoRAG achieves comparable or better performance than iterative retrieval like IRCoT while being 10-20 times cheaper and 6-13 times faster, and integrating HippoRAG into IRCoT brings further substantial gains. Finally, we show that our method can tackle new types of scenarios that are out of reach of existing methods.

Current benchmarks for assessing vision-language models (VLMs) often focus on their perception or problem-solving capabilities and neglect other critical aspects such as fairness, multilinguality, or toxicity. Furthermore, they differ in their evaluation procedures and the scope of the evaluation, making it difficult to compare models. To address these issues, we extend the HELM framework to VLMs to present the Holistic Evaluation of Vision Language Models (VHELM). VHELM aggregates various datasets to cover one or more of the 9 aspects: visual perception, knowledge, reasoning, bias, fairness, multilinguality, robustness, toxicity, and safety. In doing so, we produce a comprehensive, multi-dimensional view of the capabilities of the VLMs across these important factors. In addition, we standardize the standard inference parameters, methods of prompting, and evaluation metrics to enable fair comparisons across models. Our framework is designed to be lightweight and automatic so that evaluation runs are cheap and fast. Our initial run evaluates 22 VLMs on 21 existing datasets to provide a holistic snapshot of the models. We uncover new key findings, such as the fact that efficiency-focused models (e.g., Claude 3 Haiku or Gemini 1.5 Flash) perform significantly worse than their full models (e.g., Claude 3 Opus or Gemini 1.5 Pro) on the bias benchmark but not when evaluated on the other aspects. For transparency, we release the raw model generations and complete results on our website at https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/vhelm/v2.0.1. VHELM is intended to be a living benchmark, and we hope to continue adding new datasets and models over time.

We introduce Image2Struct, a benchmark to evaluate vision-language models (VLMs) on extracting structure from images.Our benchmark 1) captures real-world use cases, 2) is fully automatic and does not require human judgment, and 3) is based on a renewable stream of fresh data.In Image2Struct, VLMs are prompted to generate the underlying structure (e.g., LaTeX code or HTML) from an input image (e.g., webpage screenshot).The structure is then rendered to produce an output image (e.g., rendered webpage), which is compared against the input image to produce a similarity score.This round-trip evaluation allows us to quantitatively evaluate VLMs on tasks with multiple valid structures.We create a pipeline that downloads fresh data from active online communities upon execution and evaluates the VLMs without human intervention.We introduce three domains (Webpages, LaTeX, and Musical Scores) and use five image metrics (pixel similarity, cosine similarity between the Inception vectors, learned perceptual image patch similarity, structural similarity index measure, and earth mover similarity) that allow efficient and automatic comparison between pairs of images. We evaluate Image2Struct on 14 prominent VLMs and find that scores vary widely, indicating that Image2Struct can differentiate between the performances of different VLMs.Additionally, the best score varies considerably across domains (e.g., 0.402 on sheet music vs. 0.830 on LaTeX equations), indicating that Image2Struct contains tasks of varying difficulty.For transparency, we release the full results at https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/image2struct/v1.0.1/.

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities in utilizing external tools and knowledge to boost accuracy and reduce hallucinations. However, developing prompting techniques that enable LLM agents to effectively use these tools and knowledge remains a heuristic and labor-intensive task. Here, we introduce AvaTaR, a novel and automated framework that optimizes an LLM agent to effectively leverage provided tools, improving performance on a given task. During optimization, we design a comparator module to iteratively deliver insightful and comprehensive prompts to the LLM agent by contrastively reasoning between positive and negative examples sampled from training data. We demon- strate AvaTaR on four complex multimodal retrieval datasets featuring textual, visual, and relational information, and three general question-answering (QA) datasets. We find AvaTaR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across all seven tasks, exhibiting strong generalization ability when applied to novel cases and achieving an average relative improvement of 14% on the Hit@1 metric for the retrieval datasets and 13% for the QA datasets. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zou-group/avatar.

Answering real-world complex queries, such as complex product search, often requires accurate retrieval from semi-structured knowledge bases that involve blend of unstructured (e.g., textual descriptions of products) and structured (e.g., entity relations of products) information. However, many previous works studied textual and relational retrieval tasks as separate topics. To address the gap, we develop STARK, a large-scale Semi-structure retrieval benchmark on Textual and Relational Knowledge Bases. Our benchmark covers three domains: product search, academic paper search, and queries in precision medicine. We design a novel pipeline to synthesize realistic user queries that integrate diverse relational information and complex textual properties, together with their ground-truth answers (items). We conduct rigorous human evaluation to validate the quality of our synthesized queries. We further enhance the benchmark with high-quality human-generated queries to provide an authentic reference. STARK serves as a comprehensive testbed for evaluating the performance of retrieval systems driven by large language models (LLMs). Our experiments suggest that STARK presents significant challenges to the current retrieval and LLM systems, highlighting the need for more capable semi-structured retrieval systems.

Automatic medical text simplification can assist providers with patient-friendly communication and make medical texts more accessible, thereby improving health literacy. But curating a quality corpus for this task requires the supervision of medical experts. In this work, we present Med-EASi (Medical dataset for Elaborative and Abstractive Simplification), a uniquely crowdsourced and finely annotated dataset for supervised simplification of short medical texts. Its expert-layman-AI collaborative annotations facilitate controllability over text simplification by marking four kinds of textual transformations: elaboration, replacement, deletion, and insertion. To learn medical text simplification, we fine-tune T5-large with four different styles of input-output combinations, leading to two control-free and two controllable versions of the model. We add two types of controllability into text simplification, by using a multi-angle training approach: position-aware, which uses in-place annotated inputs and outputs, and position-agnostic, where the model only knows the contents to be edited, but not their positions. Our results show that our fine-grained annotations improve learning compared to the unannotated baseline. Furthermore, our position-aware control enhances the model's ability to generate better simplification than the position-agnostic version. The data and code are available at https://github.com/Chandrayee/CTRL-SIMP.

Spurred by advancements in scale, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to perform a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks zero-shot-i.e., without adaptation on downstream data.Recently, the debut of ChatGPT 1 has drawn a great deal of attention from the natural language processing (NLP) community due to the fact that it can generate high-quality responses to human input and self-correct previous mistakes based on subsequent conversations.However, it is not yet known whether ChatGPT can serve as a generalist model that can perform many NLP tasks zero-shot.In this work, we empirically analyze the zero-shot learning ability of ChatGPT by evaluating it on 20 popular NLP datasets covering 7 representative task categories.With extensive empirical studies, we demonstrate both the effectiveness and limitations of the current version of ChatGPT.We find that ChatGPT performs well on many tasks favoring reasoning capabilities (e.g., arithmetic reasoning) while it still faces challenges when solving specific tasks such as sequence tagging.We additionally provide in-depth analysis through qualitative case studies.

Visual question answering (VQA) requires systems to perform concept-level reasoning by unifying unstructured (e.g., the context in question and answer; “QA context”) and structured (e.g., knowledge graph for the QA context and scene; “concept graph”) multimodal knowledge. Existing works typically combine a scene graph and a concept graph of the scene by connecting corresponding visual nodes and concept nodes, then incorporate the QA context representation to perform question answering. However, these methods only perform a unidirectional fusion from unstructured knowledge to structured knowledge, limiting their potential to capture joint reasoning over the heterogeneous modalities of knowledge. To perform more expressive reasoning, we propose VQA-GNN, a new VQA model that performs bidirectional fusion between unstructured and structured multimodal knowledge to obtain unified knowledge representations. Specifically, we inter-connect the scene graph and the concept graph through a super node that represents the QA context, and introduce a new multimodal GNN technique to perform inter-modal message passing for reasoning that mitigates representational gaps between modalities. On two challenging VQA tasks (VCR and GQA), our method outperforms strong baseline VQA methods by 3.2% on VCR (Q-AR) and 4.6% on GQA, suggesting its strength in performing concept-level reasoning. Ablation studies further demonstrate the efficacy of the bidirectional fusion and multimodal GNN method in unifying unstructured and structured multimodal knowledge.

Recent multimodal models such as DALL-E and CM3 have achieved remarkable progress in text-to-image and image-to-text generation. However, these models store all their knowledge (e.g., the appearance of the Eiffel Tower) in the model parameters, requiring increasingly larger models and training data to capture more knowledge. To integrate knowledge in a more scalable and modular way, we propose a retrieval-augmented multimodal model, which enables a base multimodal model (generator) to refer to relevant text and images fetched by a retriever from external memory (e.g., documents on the web). Specifically, for the retriever, we use a pretrained CLIP, and for the generator, we train a CM3 Transformer on the LAION dataset. Our resulting model, named Retrieval-Augmented CM3 (RA-CM3), is the first multimodal model that can retrieve and generate both text and images. We show that RA-CM3 significantly outperforms baseline multimodal models such as DALL-E and CM3 on both image and caption generation tasks (12 FID and 17 CIDEr improvements on MS-COCO), while requiring much less compute for training (<30% of DALL-E). Moreover, we show that RA-CM3 exhibits novel capabilities such as faithful image generation and multimodal in-context learning (e.g., image generation from demonstrations).

The stunning qualitative improvement of text-to-image models has led to their widespread attention and adoption. However, we lack a comprehensive quantitative understanding of their capabilities and risks. To fill this gap, we introduce a new benchmark, Holistic Evaluation of Text-to-Image Models (HEIM). Whereas previous evaluations focus mostly on image-text alignment and image quality, we identify 12 aspects, including text-image alignment, image quality, aesthetics, originality, reasoning, knowledge, bias, toxicity, fairness, robustness, multilinguality, and efficiency. We curate 62 scenarios encompassing these aspects and evaluate 26 state-of-the-art text-to-image models on this benchmark. Our results reveal that no single model excels in all aspects, with different models demonstrating different strengths. We release the generated images and human evaluation results for full transparency at https://crfm.stanford.edu/heim/latest and the code at https://github.com/stanford-crfm/helm, which is integrated with the HELM codebase

Predicting how different interventions will causally affect a specific individual is important in a variety of domains such as personalized medicine, public policy, and online marketing. There are a large number of methods to predict the effect of an existing intervention based on historical data from individuals who received it. However, in many settings it is important to predict the effects of novel interventions (e.g., a newly invented drug), which these methods do not address. Here, we consider zero-shot causal learning: predicting the personalized effects of a novel intervention. We propose CaML, a causal meta-learning framework which formulates the personalized prediction of each intervention's effect as a task. CaML trains a single meta-model across thousands of tasks, each constructed by sampling an intervention, its recipients, and its nonrecipients. By leveraging both intervention information (e.g., a drug's attributes) and individual features (e.g., a patient's history), CaML is able to predict the personalized effects of novel interventions that do not exist at the time of training. Experimental results on real world datasets in large-scale medical claims and cell-line perturbations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Most strikingly, CaML's zero-shot predictions outperform even strong baselines trained directly on data from the test interventions.

Language model (LM) pretraining captures various knowledge from text corpora, helping downstream NLP tasks.However, existing methods such as BERT model a single document, failing to capture document dependencies and knowledge that spans across documents.In this work, we propose LinkBERT, an effective LM pretraining method that incorporates document links, such as hyperlinks.Given a pretraining corpus, we view it as a graph of documents, and create LM inputs by placing linked documents in the same context.We then train the LM with two joint self-supervised tasks: masked language modeling and our newly proposed task, document relation prediction.We study LinkBERT in two domains: general domain (pretrained on Wikipedia with hyperlinks) and biomedical domain (pretrained on PubMed with citation links).LinkBERT outperforms BERT on various downstream tasks in both domains.It is especially effective for multi-hop reasoning and few-shot QA (+5% absolute improvement on HotpotQA and TriviaQA), and our biomedical LinkBERT attains new state-of-the-art on various BioNLP tasks (+7% on BioASQ and USMLE).We release the pretrained models, LinkBERT and BioLinkBERT, as well as code and data. 1

Tianbao Xie, Chen Henry Wu, Peng Shi, Ruiqi Zhong, Torsten Scholak, Michihiro Yasunaga, Chien-Sheng Wu, Ming Zhong, Pengcheng Yin, Sida I. Wang, Victor Zhong, Bailin Wang, Chengzu Li, Connor Boyle, Ansong Ni, Ziyu Yao, Dragomir Radev, Caiming Xiong, Lingpeng Kong, Rui Zhang, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Tao Yu. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2022.

Pretraining a language model (LM) on text has been shown to help various downstream NLP tasks. Recent works show that a knowledge graph (KG) can complement text data, offering structured background knowledge that provides a useful scaffold for reasoning. However, these works are not pretrained to learn a deep fusion of the two modalities at scale, limiting the potential to acquire fully joint representations of text and KG. Here we propose DRAGON (Deep Bidirectional Language-Knowledge Graph Pretraining), a self-supervised approach to pretraining a deeply joint language-knowledge foundation model from text and KG at scale. Specifically, our model takes pairs of text segments and relevant KG subgraphs as input and bidirectionally fuses information from both modalities. We pretrain this model by unifying two self-supervised reasoning tasks, masked language modeling and KG link prediction. DRAGON outperforms existing LM and LM+KG models on diverse downstream tasks including question answering across general and biomedical domains, with +5% absolute gain on average. In particular, DRAGON achieves notable performance on complex reasoning about language and knowledge (+10% on questions involving long contexts or multi-step reasoning) and low-resource QA (+8% on OBQA and RiddleSense), and new state-of-the-art results on various BioNLP tasks. Our code and trained models are available at https://github.com/michiyasunaga/dragon.

Training a model for grammatical error correction (GEC) requires a set of labeled ungrammatical / grammatical sentence pairs, but manually annotating such pairs can be expensive.Recently, the Break-It-Fix-It (BIFI) framework has demonstrated strong results on learning to repair a broken program without any labeled examples, but this relies on a perfect critic (e.g., a compiler) that returns whether an example is valid or not, which does not exist for the GEC task.In this work, we show how to leverage a pretrained language model (LM) in defining an LM-Critic, which judges a sentence to be grammatical if the LM assigns it a higher probability than its local perturbations.We apply this LM-Critic and BIFI along with a large set of unlabeled sentences to bootstrap realistic ungrammatical/grammatical pairs for training a corrector.We evaluate our approach on GEC datasets across multiple domains (CoNLL-2014, BEA-2019, GMEG-wiki and GMEG-yahoo) and show that it outperforms existing methods in both the unsupervised setting (+7.7 F 0.5 ) and the supervised setting (+0.5 F 0.5 ).

Distribution shifts—where the training distribution differs from the test distribution—can substantially degrade the accuracy of machine learning (ML) systems deployed in the wild. Despite their ubiquity in the real-world deployments, these distribution shifts are under-represented in the datasets widely used in the ML community today. To address this gap, we present WILDS, a curated benchmark of 10 datasets reflecting a diverse range of distribution shifts that naturally arise in real-world applications, such as shifts across hospitals for tumor identification; across camera traps for wildlife monitoring; and across time and location in satellite imaging and poverty mapping. On each dataset, we show that standard training yields substantially lower out-of-distribution than in-distribution performance. This gap remains even with models trained by existing methods for tackling distribution shifts, underscoring the need for new methods for training models that are more robust to the types of distribution shifts that arise in practice. To facilitate method development, we provide an open-source package that automates dataset loading, contains default model architectures and hyperparameters, and standardizes evaluations. The full paper, code, and leaderboards are available at https://wilds.stanford.edu.

Answering complex natural language questions on knowledge graphs (KGQA) is a challenging task. It requires reasoning with the input natural language questions as well as a massive, incomplete heterogeneous KG. Prior methods obtain an abstract structured query graph/tree from the input question and traverse the KG for answers following the query tree. However, they inherently cannot deal with missing links in the KG. Here we present LEGO, a Latent Execution-Guided reasOning framework to handle this challenge in KGQA. LEGO works in an iterative way, which alternates between (1) a Query Synthesizer, which synthesizes a reasoning action and grows the query tree step-by-step, and (2) a Latent Space Executor that executes the reasoning action in the latent embedding space to combat against the missing information in KG. To learn the synthesizer without step-wise supervision, we design a generic latent execution guided bottom-up search procedure to find good execution traces efficiently in the vast query space. Experimental results on several KGQA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework compared with previous state of the art.

We consider repair tasks: given a critic (e.g., compiler) that assesses the quality of an input, the goal is to train a fixer that converts a bad example (e.g., code with syntax errors) into a good one (e.g., code with no errors). Existing works create training data consisting of (bad, good) pairs by corrupting good examples using heuristics (e.g., dropping tokens). However, fixers trained on this synthetically-generated data do not extrapolate well to the real distribution of bad inputs. To bridge this gap, we propose a new training approach, Break-It-Fix-It (BIFI), which has two key ideas: (i) we use the critic to check a fixer’s output on real bad inputs and add good (fixed) outputs to the training data, and (ii) we train a breaker to generate realistic bad code from good code. Based on these ideas, we iteratively update the breaker and the fixer while using them in conjunction to generate more paired data. We evaluate BIFI on two code repair datasets: GitHub-Python, a new dataset we introduce where the goal is to repair Python code with AST parse errors; and DeepFix, where the goal is to repair C code with compiler errors. BIFI outperforms existing methods, obtaining 90.5% repair accuracy on GitHub-Python (+28.5%) and 71.7% on DeepFix (+5.6%). Notably, BIFI does not require any labeled data; we hope it will be a strong starting point for unsupervised learning of various repair tasks.

Michihiro Yasunaga, Hongyu Ren, Antoine Bosselut, Percy Liang, Jure Leskovec. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

We consider the problem of learning to repair programs from diagnostic feedback (e.g., compiler error messages). Program repair is challenging for two reasons: First, it requires reasoning and tracking symbols across source code and diagnostic feedback. Second, labeled datasets available for program repair are relatively small. In this work, we propose novel solutions to these two challenges. First, we introduce a program-feedback graph, which connects symbols relevant to program repair in source code and diagnostic feedback, and then apply a graph neural network on top to model the reasoning process. Second, we present a self-supervised learning paradigm for program repair that leverages unlabeled programs available online to create a large amount of extra program repair examples, which we use to pre-train our models. We evaluate our proposed approach on two applications: correcting introductory programming assignments (DeepFix dataset) and correcting the outputs of program synthesis (SPoC dataset). Our final system, DrRepair, significantly outperforms prior work, achieving 68.2% full repair rate on DeepFix (+22.9% over the prior best), and 48.4% synthesis success rate on SPoC (+3.7% over the prior best).

Scientific article summarization is challenging: large, annotated corpora are not available, and the summary should ideally include the article’s impacts on research community. This paper provides novel solutions to these two challenges. We 1) develop and release the first large-scale manually-annotated corpus for scientific papers (on computational linguistics) by enabling faster annotation, and 2) propose summarization methods that integrate the authors’ original highlights (abstract) and the article’s actual impacts on the community (citations), to create comprehensive, hybrid summaries. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of our corpus in training data-driven models for scientific paper summarization and the advantage of our hybrid summaries over abstracts and traditional citation-based summaries. Our large annotated corpus and hybrid methods provide a new framework for scientific paper summarization research.

Scientific documents rely on both mathematics and text to communicate ideas. Inspired by the topical correspondence between mathematical equations and word contexts observed in scientific texts, we propose a novel topic model that jointly generates mathematical equations and their surrounding text (TopicEq). Using an extension of the correlated topic model, the context is generated from a mixture of latent topics, and the equation is generated by an RNN that depends on the latent topic activations. To experiment with this model, we create a corpus of 400K equation-context pairs extracted from a range of scientific articles from arXiv, and fit the model using a variational autoencoder approach. Experimental results show that this joint model significantly outperforms existing topic models and equation models for scientific texts. Moreover, we qualitatively show that the model effectively captures the relationship between topics and mathematics, enabling novel applications such as topic-aware equation generation, equation topic inference, and topic-aware alignment of mathematical symbols and words.

Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Yi Chern Tan, Xi Victoria Lin, Suyi Li, Heyang Er, Irene Li, Bo Pang, Tao Chen, Emily Ji, Shreya Dixit, David Proctor, Sungrok Shim, Jonathan Kraft, Vincent Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Dragomir Radev. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2019.

Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Heyang Er, Suyi Li, Eric Xue, Bo Pang, Xi Victoria Lin, Yi Chern Tan, Tianze Shi, Zihan Li, Youxuan Jiang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Sungrok Shim, Tao Chen, Alexander Fabbri, Zifan Li, Luyao Chen, Yuwen Zhang, Shreya Dixit, Vincent Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Walter Lasecki, Dragomir Radev. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

The deluge of scholarly publication poses a challenge for scholars find relevant research and policy makers to seek in-depth information and understand research impact. Information retrieval (IR), natural language processing (NLP) and bibliometrics could enhance scholarly search, retrieval and user experience, but their use in digital libraries is not widespread. To address this gap, we propose the 4th Joint Workshop on BIRNDL and the 5th CL-SciSumm Shared Task. We seek to foster collaboration among researchers in NLP, IR and Digital Libraries (DL), and to stimulate the development of new methods in NLP, IR, recommendation systems and scientometrics toward improved scholarly document understanding, analysis, and retrieval at scale.

Most existing studies in text-to-SQL tasks do not require generating complex SQL queries with multiple clauses or sub-queries, and generalizing to new, unseen databases.In this paper we propose SyntaxSQLNet, a syntax tree network to address the complex and crossdomain text-to-SQL generation task.Syn-taxSQLNet employs a SQL specific syntax tree-based decoder with SQL generation path history and table-aware column attention encoders.We evaluate SyntaxSQLNet on a new large-scale text-to-SQL corpus containing databases with multiple tables and complex SQL queries containing multiple SQL clauses and nested queries.We use a database split setting where databases in the test set are unseen during training.Experimental results show that SyntaxSQLNet can handle a significantly greater number of complex SQL examples than prior work, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art model by 9.5% in exact matching accuracy.To our knowledge, we are the first to study this complex text-to-SQL task.Our task and models with the latest updates are available at https://yale-lily. github.io/seq2sql/spider.

Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Kai Yang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Dongxu Wang, Zifan Li, James Ma, Irene Li, Qingning Yao, Shanelle Roman, Zilin Zhang, Dragomir Radev. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2018.

Michihiro Yasunaga, Jungo Kasai, Dragomir Radev. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers). 2018.

We propose a neural multi-document summarization (MDS) system that incorporates sentence relation graphs.We employ a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) on the relation graphs, with sentence embeddings obtained from Recurrent Neural Networks as input node features.Through multiple layer-wise propagation, the GCN generates high-level hidden sentence features for salience estimation.We then use a greedy heuristic to extract salient sentences while avoiding redundancy.In our experiments on DUC 2004, we consider three types of sentence relation graphs and demonstrate the advantage of combining sentence relations in graphs with the representation power of deep neural networks.Our model improves upon traditional graph-based extractive approaches and the vanilla GRU sequence model with no graph, and it achieves competitive results against other state-of-the-art multidocument summarization systems.