Counterfactually-Augmented Data (CAD) -- minimal editing of sentences to flip the corresponding labels -- has the potential to improve the Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) generalization capability of language models, as CAD induces language models to exploit domain-independent causal features and exclude spurious correlations. However, the empirical results of CAD's OOD generalization are not as efficient as anticipated. In this study, we attribute the inefficiency to the myopia phenomenon caused by CAD: language models only focus on causal features that are edited in the augmentation operation and exclude other non-edited causal features. Therefore, the potential of CAD is not fully exploited. To address this issue, we analyze the myopia phenomenon in feature space from the perspective of Fisher's Linear Discriminant, then we introduce two additional constraints based on CAD's structural properties (dataset-level and sentence-level) to help language models extract more complete causal features in CAD, thereby mitigating the myopia phenomenon and improving OOD generalization capability. We evaluate our method on two tasks: Sentiment Analysis and Natural Language Inference, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method could unlock the potential of CAD and improve the OOD generalization performance of language models by 1.0% to 5.9%.

Multimodal information extraction is attracting research attention nowadays, which requires aggregating representations from different modalities. In this paper, we present the Intra- and Inter-Sample Relationship Modeling (I2SRM) method for this task, which contains two modules. Firstly, the intra-sample relationship modeling module operates on a single sample and aims to learn effective representations. Embeddings from textual and visual modalities are shifted to bridge the modality gap caused by distinct pre-trained language and image models. Secondly, the inter-sample relationship modeling module considers relationships among multiple samples and focuses on capturing the interactions. An AttnMixup strategy is proposed, which not only enables collaboration among samples but also augments data to improve generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on the multimodal named entity recognition datasets Twitter-2015 and Twitter-2017, and the multimodal relation extraction dataset MNRE. Our proposed method I2SRM achieves competitive results, 77.12% F1-score on Twitter-2015, 88.40% F1-score on Twitter-2017, and 84.12% F1-score on MNRE.

This paper proposes a method of abstractive summarization designed to scale to document collections instead of individual documents. Our approach applies a combination of semantic clustering, document size reduction within topic clusters, semantic chunking of a cluster's documents, GPT-based summarization and concatenation, and a combined sentiment and text visualization of each topic to support exploratory data analysis. Statistical comparison of our results to existing state-of-the-art systems BART, BRIO, PEGASUS, and MoCa using ROGUE summary scores showed statistically equivalent performance with BART and PEGASUS on the CNN/Daily Mail test dataset, and with BART on the Gigaword test dataset. This finding is promising since we view document collection summarization as more challenging than individual document summarization. We conclude with a discussion of how issues of scale are

The collaboration between quantum computing and classical machine learning offers potential advantages in natural language processing, particularly in the sentiment analysis of human emotions and opinions expressed in large-scale datasets. In this work, we propose a methodology for sentiment analysis using hybrid quantum-classical machine learning algorithms. We investigate quantum kernel approaches and variational quantum circuit-based classifiers and integrate them with classical dimension reduction techniques such as PCA and Haar wavelet transform. The proposed methodology is evaluated using two distinct datasets, based on English and Bengali languages. Experimental results show that after dimensionality reduction of the data, performance of the quantum-based hybrid algorithms were consistent and better than classical methods.

Information Extraction (IE) is an essential task in Natural Language Processing. Traditional methods have relied on coarse-grained extraction with simple instructions. However, with the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a need to adapt IE techniques to leverage the capabilities of these models. This paper introduces a fine-grained IE benchmark dataset tailored for LLMs, employing augmented instructions for each information type, which includes task descriptions, extraction rules, output formats, and examples. Through extensive evaluations, we observe that encoder-decoder models, particularly T5 and FLAN-T5, perform well in generalizing to unseen information types, while ChatGPT exhibits greater adaptability to new task forms. Our results also indicate that performance is not solely dictated by model scale, and highlight the significance of architecture, data diversity, and learning techniques. This work paves the way for a more refined and versatile utilization of LLMs in Information Extraction.

Generally, the emotional polarity of an aspect exists in the corresponding opinion expression, whose diversity has great impact on model's performance. To mitigate this problem, we propose a novel and simple counterfactual data augmentation method to generate opinion expressions with reversed sentiment polarity. In particular, the integrated gradients are calculated to locate and mask the opinion expression. Then, a prompt combined with the reverse expression polarity is added to the original text, and a Pre-trained language model (PLM), T5, is finally was employed to predict the masks. The experimental results shows the proposed counterfactual data augmentation method performs better than current augmentation methods on three ABSA datasets, i.e.

In this paper, we introduce strategies for developing private Key Information Extraction (KIE) systems by leveraging large pretrained document foundation models in conjunction with differential privacy (DP), federated learning (FL), and Differentially Private Federated Learning (DP-FL). Through extensive experimentation on six benchmark datasets (FUNSD, CORD, SROIE, WildReceipts, XFUND, and DOCILE), we demonstrate that large document foundation models can be effectively fine-tuned for the KIE task under private settings to achieve adequate performance while maintaining strong privacy guarantees. Moreover, by thoroughly analyzing the impact of various training and model parameters on model performance, we propose simple yet effective guidelines for achieving an optimal privacy-utility trade-off for the KIE task under global DP. Finally, we introduce FeAm-DP, a novel DP-FL algorithm that enables efficiently upscaling global DP from a standalone context to a multi-client federated environment. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the algorithm across various client and privacy settings, and demonstrate its capability to achieve comparable performance and privacy guarantees to standalone DP, even when accommodating an increasing number of participating clients. Overall, our study offers valuable insights into the development of private KIE systems, and highlights the potential of document foundation models for privacy-preserved Document AI applications. To the best of authors' knowledge, this is the first work that explores privacy preserved document KIE using document foundation models.

Multimodal information extraction (MIE) aims to extract structured information from unstructured multimedia content. Due to the diversity of tasks and settings, most current MIE models are task-specific and data-intensive, which limits their generalization to real-world scenarios with diverse task requirements and limited labeled data. To address these issues, we propose a novel multimodal question answering (MQA) framework to unify three MIE tasks by reformulating them into a unified span extraction and multi-choice QA pipeline. Extensive experiments on six datasets show that: 1) Our MQA framework consistently and significantly improves the performances of various off-the-shelf large multimodal models (LMM) on MIE tasks, compared to vanilla prompting. 2) In the zero-shot setting, MQA outperforms previous state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin. In addition, the effectiveness of our framework can successfully transfer to the few-shot setting, enhancing LMMs on a scale of 10B parameters to be competitive or outperform much larger language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. Our MQA framework can serve as a general principle of utilizing LMMs to better solve MIE and potentially other downstream multimodal tasks.

Memes are the new-age conveyance mechanism for humor on social media sites. Memes often include an image and some text. Memes can be used to promote disinformation or hatred, thus it is crucial to investigate in details. We introduce Memotion 3, a new dataset with 10,000 annotated memes. Unlike other prevalent datasets in the domain, including prior iterations of Memotion, Memotion 3 introduces Hindi-English Codemixed memes while prior works in the area were limited to only the English memes. We describe the Memotion task, the data collection and the dataset creation methodologies. We also provide a baseline for the task.

Sentiment analysis plays a crucial role in understanding the sentiment expressed in text data. While sentiment analysis research has been extensively conducted in English and other Western languages, there exists a significant gap in research efforts for sentiment analysis in low-resource languages. Limited resources, including datasets and NLP research, hinder the progress in this area. In this work, we present an exhaustive study of data augmentation approaches for the low-resource Indic language Marathi. Although domain-specific datasets for sentiment analysis in Marathi exist, they often fall short when applied to generalized and variable-length inputs. To address this challenge, this research paper proposes four data augmentation techniques for sentiment analysis in Marathi. The paper focuses on augmenting existing datasets to compensate for the lack of sufficient resources. The primary objective is to enhance sentiment analysis model performance in both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios by leveraging data augmentation strategies. The data augmentation approaches proposed showed a significant performance improvement for cross-domain accuracies. The augmentation methods include paraphrasing, back-translation; BERT-based random token replacement, named entity replacement, and pseudo-label generation; GPT-based text and label generation. Furthermore, these techniques can be extended to other low-resource languages and for general text classification tasks.