The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) is reshaping multimodel models, with speech synthesis being a prominent application. However, existing approaches often underutilize the linguistic intelligence of these models, typically failing to leverage their powerful instruction-following capabilities. This limitation hinders the model's ability to follow text instructions for controllable Text-to-Speech~(TTS). To address this, we propose a new paradigm inspired by ``operationalism'' that decouples instruction understanding from speech generation. We introduce BatonVoice, a framework where an LLM acts as a ``conductor'', understanding user instructions and generating a textual ``plan'' -- explicit vocal features (e.g., pitch, energy). A separate TTS model, the ``orchestra'', then generates the speech from these features. To realize this component, we develop BatonTTS, a TTS model trained specifically for this task. Our experiments demonstrate that BatonVoice achieves strong performance in controllable and emotional speech synthesis, outperforming strong open- and closed-source baselines. Notably, our approach enables remarkable zero-shot cross-lingual generalization, accurately applying feature control abilities to languages unseen during post-training. This demonstrates that objectifying speech into textual vocal features can more effectively unlock the linguistic intelligence of LLMs.

The widespread deployment of LLMs across enterprise services has created a critical security blind spot. Organizations operate multiple LLM services handling billions of queries daily, yet regulatory compliance boundaries prevent these services from sharing threat intelligence about prompt injection attacks, the top security risk for LLMs. When an attack is detected in one service, the same threat may persist undetected in others for months, as privacy regulations prohibit sharing user prompts across compliance boundaries. We present BinaryShield, the first privacy-preserving threat intelligence system that enables secure sharing of attack fingerprints across compliance boundaries. BinaryShield transforms suspicious prompts through a unique pipeline combining PII redaction, semantic embedding, binary quantization, and randomized response mechanism to potentially generate non-invertible fingerprints that preserve attack patterns while providing privacy. Our evaluations demonstrate that BinaryShield achieves an F1-score of 0.94, significantly outperforming SimHash (0.77), the privacy-preserving baseline, while achieving 64x storage reduction and 38x faster similarity search compared to dense embeddings.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled impressive performance in various tasks. However, standard prompting often struggles to produce structurally valid and accurate outputs, especially in dependency parsing. We propose a novel step-by-step instruction strategy, where universal part-of-speech tagging precedes the prediction of syntactic heads and dependency labels, and a simplified CoNLL-U like output format, our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on Universal Dependencies datasets across 17 languages without hallucination or contamination. We further show that multilingual fine-tuning simultaneously improves cross-language generalization performance. Our results highlight the effectiveness of explicit reasoning steps in LLM-based parsing and offer a scalable, format-consistent alternative to bracket-based approaches.

The persistent accumulation of unresolved legal cases, especially within the Indian judiciary, significantly hampers the timely delivery of justice. Manual methods of prioritizing petitions are often prone to inefficiencies and subjective biases further exacerbating delays. To address this issue, we propose LLMPR (Large Language Model-based Petition Ranking), an automated framework that utilizes transfer learning and machine learning to assign priority rankings to legal petitions based on their contextual urgency. Leveraging the ILDC dataset comprising 7,593 annotated petitions, we process unstructured legal text and extract features through various embedding techniques, including DistilBERT, LegalBERT, and MiniLM. These textual embeddings are combined with quantitative indicators such as gap days, rank scores, and word counts to train multiple machine learning models, including Random Forest, Decision Tree, XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost. Our experiments demonstrate that Random Forest and Decision Tree models yield superior performance, with accuracy exceeding 99% and a Spearman rank correlation of 0.99. Notably, models using only numerical features achieve nearly optimal ranking results (R2 = 0.988, \r{ho} = 0.998), while LLM-based embeddings offer only marginal gains. These findings suggest that automated petition ranking can effectively streamline judicial workflows, reduce case backlog, and improve fairness in legal prioritization.

Text-to-speech (TTS) technology has achieved impressive results for widely spoken languages, yet many under-resourced languages remain challenged by limited data and linguistic complexities. In this paper, we present a novel methodology that integrates a data-optimized framework with an advanced acoustic model to build high-quality TTS systems for low-resource scenarios. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using Thai as an illustrative case, where intricate phonetic rules and sparse resources are effectively addressed. Our method enables zero-shot voice cloning and improved performance across diverse client applications, ranging from finance to healthcare, education, and law. Extensive evaluations - both subjective and objective - confirm that our model meets state-of-the-art standards, offering a scalable solution for TTS production in data-limited settings, with significant implications for broader industry adoption and multilingual accessibility.

Lexicon-based sentiment analysis (SA) in finance leverages specialized, manually annotated lexicons created by human experts to extract sentiment from financial texts. Although lexicon-based methods are simple to implement and fast to operate on textual data, they require considerable manual annotation efforts to create, maintain, and update the lexicons. These methods are also considered inferior to the deep learning-based approaches, such as transformer models, which have become dominant in various NLP tasks due to their remarkable performance. However, transformers require extensive data and computational resources for both training and testing. Additionally, they involve significant prediction times, making them unsuitable for real-time production environments or systems with limited processing capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a novel methodology named eXplainable Lexicons (XLex) that combines the advantages of both lexicon-based methods and transformer models. We propose an approach that utilizes transformers and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) for explainability to learn financial lexicons. Our study presents four main contributions. Firstly, we demonstrate that transformer-aided explainable lexicons can enhance the vocabulary coverage of the benchmark Loughran-McDonald (LM) lexicon, reducing the human involvement in annotating, maintaining, and updating the lexicons. Secondly, we show that the resulting lexicon outperforms the standard LM lexicon in SA of financial datasets. Thirdly, we illustrate that the lexicon-based approach is significantly more efficient in terms of model speed and size compared to transformers. Lastly, the XLex approach is inherently more interpretable than transformer models as lexicon models rely on predefined rules, allowing for better insights into the results of SA and making the XLex approach a viable tool for financial decision-making.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) models have made significant progress in recent years. However, previous studies primarily focus on datasets written by annotators, which has resulted in a gap between academic research and real-world spoken conversation scenarios. While several small-scale spoken TOD datasets are proposed to address robustness issues such as ASR errors, they ignore the unique challenges in spoken conversation. To tackle the limitations, we introduce SpokenWOZ, a large-scale speech-text dataset for spoken TOD, containing 8 domains, 203k turns, 5.7k dialogues and 249 hours of audios from human-to-human spoken conversations. SpokenWOZ further incorporates common spoken characteristics such as word-by-word processing and reasoning in spoken language. Based on these characteristics, we present cross-turn slot and reasoning slot detection as new challenges. We conduct experiments on various baselines, including text-modal models, newly proposed dual-modal models, and LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT. The results show that the current models still have substantial room for improvement in spoken conversation, where the most advanced dialogue state tracker only achieves 25.65% in joint goal accuracy and the SOTA end-to-end model only correctly completes the user request in 52.1% of dialogues.

Data visualization is a powerful tool for exploring and communicating insights in various domains. To automate visualization choice for datasets, a task known as visualization recommendation has been proposed. Various machine-learning-based approaches have been developed for this purpose, but they often require a large corpus of dataset-visualization pairs for training and lack natural explanations for their results. To address this research gap, we propose LLM4Vis, a novel ChatGPT-based prompting approach to perform visualization recommendation and return human-like explanations using very few demonstration examples. Our approach involves feature description, demonstration example selection, explanation generation, demonstration example construction, and inference steps. To obtain demonstration examples with high-quality explanations, we propose a new explanation generation bootstrapping to iteratively refine generated explanations by considering the previous generation and template-based hint. Evaluations on the VizML dataset show that LLM4Vis outperforms or performs similarly to supervised learning models like Random Forest, Decision Tree, and MLP in both few-shot and zero-shot settings. The qualitative evaluation also shows the effectiveness of explanations generated by LLM4Vis. We make our code publicly available at \href{https://github.com/demoleiwang/LLM4Vis}{https://github.com/demoleiwang/LLM4Vis}.

Without any explicit cross-lingual training data, multilingual language models can achieve cross-lingual transfer. One common way to improve this transfer is to perform realignment steps before fine-tuning, i.e., to train the model to build similar representations for pairs of words from translated sentences. But such realignment methods were found to not always improve results across languages and tasks, which raises the question of whether aligned representations are truly beneficial for cross-lingual transfer. We provide evidence that alignment is actually significantly correlated with cross-lingual transfer across languages, models and random seeds. We show that fine-tuning can have a significant impact on alignment, depending mainly on the downstream task and the model. Finally, we show that realignment can, in some instances, improve cross-lingual transfer, and we identify conditions in which realignment methods provide significant improvements. Namely, we find that realignment works better on tasks for which alignment is correlated with cross-lingual transfer when generalizing to a distant language and with smaller models, as well as when using a bilingual dictionary rather than FastAlign to extract realignment pairs. For example, for POS-tagging, between English and Arabic, realignment can bring a +15.8 accuracy improvement on distilmBERT, even outperforming XLM-R Large by 1.7. We thus advocate for further research on realignment methods for smaller multilingual models as an alternative to scaling.

A number of researchers have recently questioned the necessity of increasingly complex neural network (NN) architectures. In particular, several recent papers have shown that simpler, properly tuned models are at least competitive across several NLP tasks. In this work, we show that this is also the case for text generation from structured and unstructured data. We consider neural table-to-text generation and neural question generation (NQG) tasks for text generation from structured and unstructured data, respectively. Table-to-text generation aims to generate a description based on a given table, and NQG is the task of generating a question from a given passage where the generated question can be answered by a certain sub-span of the passage using NN models. Experimental results demonstrate that a basic attention-based seq2seq model trained with the exponential moving average technique achieves the state of the art in both tasks.