Byte pair encoding (BPE) emerges as an effective tokenization method for tackling the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) challenge in various natural language and speech processing tasks. Recent research highlights the dependency of BPE subword tokenization's efficacy on the morphological nature of the language, particularly in languages rich in inflectional morphology, where fewer BPE merges suffice for generating highly productive tokens. Motivated by this, our study empirically identifies the optimal number of BPE tokens for Bengali, a language known for its morphological complexity, thus enhancing out-of-distribution automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance. Experimental evaluation reveals that an excessively high number of BPE tokens can lead to overfitting, while approximately 500-1000 tokens result in superior OOV performance. Furthermore, we conduct a comparative analysis of BPE with character-based and unigram-based tokenization methods. By introducing BPE tokenization to Bengali ASR, we achieve a substantial reduction in the word error rate (WER) from 66.44% in our character-based baseline system to 63.80% on the LB-ASRTD eval set and from 46.34% to 42.80% on the SHRUTI eval set, both of which include out-of-distribution data.

This paper investigates the potential benefits of language-specific fact-checking models, focusing on the case of Chinese. We demonstrate the limitations of methods such as translating Chinese claims and evidence into English or directly using multilingual large language models (e.g. GPT4), highlighting the need for language-specific systems. We further develop a state-of-the-art Chinese fact-checking system that, in contrast to previous approaches which treat evidence selection as a pairwise sentence classification task, considers the context of sentences. We also create an adversarial dataset to identify biases in our model, and while they are present as in English language datasets and models, they are often specific to the Chinese culture. Our study emphasizes the importance of language-specific fact-checking models to effectively combat misinformation.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) bears the promise of being an enabling technology for many applications. However, since most of the literature in the field is currently focused on opaque models, the use of RL in high-stakes scenarios, where interpretability is crucial, is still limited. Recently, some approaches to interpretable RL, e.g., based on Decision Trees, have been proposed, but one of the main limitations of these techniques is their training cost. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new population-based method, called Social Interpretable RL (SIRL), inspired by social learning principles, to improve learning efficiency. Our method mimics a social learning process, where each agent in a group learns to solve a given task based both on its own individual experience as well as the experience acquired together with its peers. Our approach is divided into two phases. In the \emph{collaborative phase}, all the agents in the population interact with a shared instance of the environment, where each agent observes the state and independently proposes an action. Then, voting is performed to choose the action that will actually be performed in the environment. In the \emph{individual phase}, each agent refines its individual performance by interacting with its own instance of the environment. This mechanism makes the agents experience a larger number of episodes while simultaneously reducing the computational cost of the process. Our results on six well-known benchmarks show that SIRL reaches state-of-the-art performance w.r.t. the alternative interpretable methods from the literature.

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are composed of multiple words and exhibit variable degrees of compositionality. As such, their meanings are notoriously difficult to model, and it is unclear to what extent this issue affects transformer architectures. Addressing this gap, we provide the first in-depth survey of MWE processing with transformer models. We overall find that they capture MWE semantics inconsistently, as shown by reliance on surface patterns and memorized information. MWE meaning is also strongly localized, predominantly in early layers of the architecture. Representations benefit from specific linguistic properties, such as lower semantic idiosyncrasy and ambiguity of target expressions. Our findings overall question the ability of transformer models to robustly capture fine-grained semantics. Furthermore, we highlight the need for more directly comparable evaluation setups.

Topic models have been prevalent for decades to discover latent topics and infer topic proportions of documents in an unsupervised fashion. They have been widely used in various applications like text analysis and context recommendation. Recently, the rise of neural networks has facilitated the emergence of a new research field -- Neural Topic Models (NTMs). Different from conventional topic models, NTMs directly optimize parameters without requiring model-specific derivations. This endows NTMs with better scalability and flexibility, resulting in significant research attention and plentiful new methods and applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on neural topic models concerning methods, applications, and challenges. Specifically, we systematically organize current NTM methods according to their network structures and introduce the NTMs for various scenarios like short texts and cross-lingual documents. We also discuss a wide range of popular applications built on NTMs. Finally, we highlight the challenges confronted by NTMs to inspire future research.

How can we compress language models without sacrificing accuracy? The number of compression algorithms for language models is rapidly growing to benefit from remarkable advances of recent language models without side effects due to the gigantic size of language models, such as increased carbon emissions and expensive maintenance fees. While numerous compression algorithms have shown remarkable progress in compressing language models, it ironically becomes challenging to capture emerging trends and identify the fundamental concepts underlying them due to the excessive number of algorithms. In this paper, we survey and summarize diverse compression algorithms including pruning, quantization, knowledge distillation, low-rank approximation, parameter sharing, and efficient architecture design. We not only summarize the overall trend of diverse compression algorithms but also select representative algorithms and provide in-depth analyses of them. We discuss the value of each category of compression algorithms, and the desired properties of low-cost compression algorithms which have a significant impact due to the emergence of large language models. Finally, we introduce promising future research topics based on our survey results.

This chapter focuses on gender-related errors in machine translation (MT) in the context of low-resource languages. We begin by explaining what low-resource languages are, examining the inseparable social and computational factors that create such linguistic hierarchies. We demonstrate through a case study of our mother tongue Bengali, a global language spoken by almost 300 million people but still classified as low-resource, how gender is assumed and inferred in translations to and from the high(est)-resource English when no such information is provided in source texts. We discuss the postcolonial and societal impacts of such errors leading to linguistic erasure and representational harms, and conclude by discussing potential solutions towards uplifting languages by providing them more agency in MT conversations.

In this paper, we propose a method for knowledge graph construction in power distribution networks. This method leverages entity features, which involve their semantic, phonetic, and syntactic characteristics, in both the knowledge graph of distribution network and the dispatching texts. An enhanced model based on Convolutional Neural Network, is utilized for effectively matching dispatch text entities with those in the knowledge graph. The effectiveness of this model is evaluated through experiments in real-world power distribution dispatch scenarios. The results indicate that, compared with the baselines, the proposed model excels in linking a variety of entity types, demonstrating high overall accuracy in power distribution knowledge graph construction task.

AI safety training and red-teaming of large language models (LLMs) are measures to mitigate the generation of unsafe content. Our work exposes the inherent cross-lingual vulnerability of these safety mechanisms, resulting from the linguistic inequality of safety training data, by successfully circumventing GPT-4's safeguard through translating unsafe English inputs into low-resource languages. On the AdvBench benchmark, GPT-4 engages with the unsafe translated inputs and provides actionable items that can get the users towards their harmful goals 79% of the time, which is on par with or even surpassing state-of-the-art jailbreaking attacks. Other high-/mid-resource languages have significantly lower attack success rates, which suggests that the cross-lingual vulnerability mainly applies to low-resource languages. Previously, limited training on low-resource languages primarily affected speakers of those languages, causing technological disparities. However, our work highlights a crucial shift: this deficiency now poses a risk to all LLMs users. Publicly available translation APIs enable anyone to exploit LLMs' safety vulnerabilities. Therefore, our work calls for more holistic red-teaming efforts to develop robust multilingual safeguards with wide language coverage. Content Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful language.

We study the problem of in-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) on private datasets. This scenario poses privacy risks, as LLMs may leak or regurgitate the private examples demonstrated in the prompt. We propose a novel algorithm that generates synthetic few-shot demonstrations from the private dataset with formal differential privacy (DP) guarantees, and show empirically that it can achieve effective ICL. We conduct extensive experiments on standard benchmarks and compare our algorithm with non-private ICL and zero-shot solutions. Our results demonstrate that our algorithm can achieve competitive performance with strong privacy levels. The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs), popularized by the seminal work of Brown et al. (2020), has revolutionized the field of natural language processing and machine learning; see Dong et al. (2023) for a survey on ICL and the references therein. In-context learning involves downstream task adaptation without modifying a pre-trained model's weights. This is achieved by conditioning the model through a series of demonstrations of the task at hand appended as a prompt. An advantage of ICL is that it offers a cost-effective and adaptable alternative to finetuning LLMs. By leveraging the model's pre-trained knowledge, it enables efficient generalization across tasks, allows for quick adaptation to new domains or concepts, and requires only a handful of labeled examples for adaptation. However, privacy is a concern when deploying LLMs with users' data incorporated into prompts. As an example, consider healthcare AI applications, where clinical reports belonging to the patients may be used as demonstrations to provide relevant context to the LLM to answer queries. A malicious adversary might attempt to circumvent API restrictions through jailbreaking thereby gaining direct access to the demonstrations as depicted in Figure 1. More generally, it is a major concern that LLMs may regurgitate prompt data in their output (Priyanshu et al., 2023; Duan et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023). These scenarios raise privacy risks regarding the data used for constructing the prompt.