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 typographical error


Evaluating Robustness of Large Language Models Against Multilingual Typographical Errors

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multilingual, real-world applications with user inputs -- naturally introducing typographical errors (typos). Yet most benchmarks assume clean input, leaving the robustness of LLMs to typos across languages largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce MulTypo, a multilingual typo generation algorithm that simulates human-like errors based on language-specific keyboard layouts and typing behavior. We evaluate 18 open-source LLMs across three model families and five downstream tasks spanning language inference, multi-choice question answering, mathematical reasoning, and machine translation tasks. Our results show that typos consistently degrade performance, particularly in generative tasks and those requiring reasoning -- while the natural language inference task is comparatively more robust. Instruction tuning improves clean-input performance but may increase brittleness under noise. We also observe language-dependent robustness: high-resource languages are generally more robust than low-resource ones, and translation from English is more robust than translation into English. Our findings underscore the need for noise-aware training and multilingual robustness evaluation. We make our code and data publicly available.


Brain-to-Text Decoding: A Non-invasive Approach via Typing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Modern neuroprostheses can now restore communication in patients who have lost the ability to speak or move. However, these invasive devices entail risks inherent to neurosurgery. Here, we introduce a non-invasive method to decode the production of sentences from brain activity and demonstrate its efficacy in a cohort of 35 healthy volunteers. For this, we present Brain2Qwerty, a new deep learning architecture trained to decode sentences from either electro- (EEG) or magneto-encephalography (MEG), while participants typed briefly memorized sentences on a QWERTY keyboard. With MEG, Brain2Qwerty reaches, on average, a character-error-rate (CER) of 32% and substantially outperforms EEG (CER: 67%). For the best participants, the model achieves a CER of 19%, and can perfectly decode a variety of sentences outside of the training set. While error analyses suggest that decoding depends on motor processes, the analysis of typographical errors suggests that it also involves higher-level cognitive factors. Overall, these results narrow the gap between invasive and non-invasive methods and thus open the path for developing safe brain-computer interfaces for non-communicating patients.


Robust Table Integration in Data Lakes

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we investigate the challenge of integrating tables from data lakes, focusing on three core tasks: 1) pairwise integrability judgment, which determines whether a tuple pair in a table is integrable, accounting for any occurrences of semantic equivalence or typographical errors; 2) integrable set discovery, which aims to identify all integrable sets in a table based on pairwise integrability judgments established in the first task; 3) multi-tuple conflict resolution, which resolves conflicts among multiple tuples during integration. We train a binary classifier to address the task of pairwise integrability judgment. Given the scarcity of labeled data, we propose a self-supervised adversarial contrastive learning algorithm to perform classification, which incorporates data augmentation methods and adversarial examples to autonomously generate new training data. Upon the output of pairwise integrability judgment, each integrable set is considered as a community, a densely connected sub-graph where nodes and edges correspond to tuples in the table and their pairwise integrability, respectively. We proceed to investigate various community detection algorithms to address the integrable set discovery objective. Moving forward to tackle multi-tuple conflict resolution, we introduce an novel in-context learning methodology. This approach capitalizes on the knowledge embedded within pretrained large language models to effectively resolve conflicts that arise when integrating multiple tuples. Notably, our method minimizes the need for annotated data. Since no suitable test collections are available for our tasks, we develop our own benchmarks using two real-word dataset repositories: Real and Join. We conduct extensive experiments on these benchmarks to validate the robustness and applicability of our methodologies in the context of integrating tables within data lakes.


Reasoning Robustness of LLMs to Adversarial Typographical Errors

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, CoT can be biased by users' instruction. In this work, we study the reasoning robustness of LLMs to typographical errors, which can naturally occur in users' queries. We design an Adversarial Typo Attack ($\texttt{ATA}$) algorithm that iteratively samples typos for words that are important to the query and selects the edit that is most likely to succeed in attacking. It shows that LLMs are sensitive to minimal adversarial typographical changes. Notably, with 1 character edit, Mistral-7B-Instruct's accuracy drops from 43.7% to 38.6% on GSM8K, while with 8 character edits the performance further drops to 19.2%. To extend our evaluation to larger and closed-source LLMs, we develop the $\texttt{R$^2$ATA}$ benchmark, which assesses models' $\underline{R}$easoning $\underline{R}$obustness to $\underline{\texttt{ATA}}$. It includes adversarial typographical questions derived from three widely used reasoning datasets-GSM8K, BBH, and MMLU-by applying $\texttt{ATA}$ to open-source LLMs. $\texttt{R$^2$ATA}$ demonstrates remarkable transferability and causes notable performance drops across multiple super large and closed-source LLMs.


Towards Explainable Automated Data Quality Enhancement without Domain Knowledge

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In the era of big data, ensuring the quality of datasets has become increasingly crucial across various domains. We propose a comprehensive framework designed to automatically assess and rectify data quality issues in any given dataset, regardless of its specific content, focusing on both textual and numerical data. Our primary objective is to address three fundamental types of defects: absence, redundancy, and incoherence. At the heart of our approach lies a rigorous demand for both explainability and interpretability, ensuring that the rationale behind the identification and correction of data anomalies is transparent and understandable. To achieve this, we adopt a hybrid approach that integrates statistical methods with machine learning algorithms. Indeed, by leveraging statistical techniques alongside machine learning, we strike a balance between accuracy and explainability, enabling users to trust and comprehend the assessment process. Acknowledging the challenges associated with automating the data quality assessment process, particularly in terms of time efficiency and accuracy, we adopt a pragmatic strategy, employing resource-intensive algorithms only when necessary, while favoring simpler, more efficient solutions whenever possible. Through a practical analysis conducted on a publicly provided dataset, we illustrate the challenges that arise when trying to enhance data quality while keeping explainability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in detecting and rectifying missing values, duplicates and typographical errors as well as the challenges remaining to be addressed to achieve similar accuracy on statistical outliers and logic errors under the constraints set in our work.


Resilience of Large Language Models for Noisy Instructions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As the rapidly advancing domain of natural language processing (NLP), large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for interpreting human commands and generating text across various tasks. Nonetheless, the resilience of LLMs to handle text containing inherent errors, stemming from human interactions and collaborative systems, has not been thoroughly explored. Our study investigates the resilience of LLMs against five common types of disruptions including 1) ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) errors, 2) OCR (Optical Character Recognition) errors, 3) grammatical mistakes, 4) typographical errors, and 5) distractive content. We aim to investigate how these models react by deliberately embedding these errors into instructions. Our findings reveal that while some LLMs show a degree of resistance to certain types of noise, their overall performance significantly suffers. This emphasizes the importance of further investigation into enhancing model resilience. In response to the observed decline in performance, our study also evaluates a "re-pass" strategy, designed to purify the instructions of noise before the LLMs process them. Our analysis indicates that correcting noisy instructions, particularly for open-source LLMs, presents significant challenges.


Persian Typographical Error Type Detection Using Deep Neural Networks on Algorithmically-Generated Misspellings

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Spelling correction is a remarkable challenge in the field of natural language processing. The objective of spelling correction tasks is to recognize and rectify spelling errors automatically. The development of applications that can effectually diagnose and correct Persian spelling and grammatical errors has become more important in order to improve the quality of Persian text. The Typographical Error Type Detection in Persian is a relatively understudied area. Therefore, this paper presents a compelling approach for detecting typographical errors in Persian texts. Our work includes the presentation of a publicly available dataset called FarsTypo, which comprises 3.4 million words arranged in chronological order and tagged with their corresponding part-of-speech. These words cover a wide range of topics and linguistic styles. We develop an algorithm designed to apply Persian-specific errors to a scalable portion of these words, resulting in a parallel dataset of correct and incorrect words. By leveraging FarsTypo, we establish a strong foundation and conduct a thorough comparison of various methodologies employing different architectures. Additionally, we introduce a groundbreaking Deep Sequential Neural Network that utilizes both word and character embeddings, along with bidirectional LSTM layers, for token classification aimed at detecting typographical errors across 51 distinct classes. Our approach is contrasted with highly advanced industrial systems that, unlike this study, have been developed using a diverse range of resources. The outcomes of our final method proved to be highly competitive, achieving an accuracy of 97.62%, precision of 98.83%, recall of 98.61%, and surpassing others in terms of speed.


Domain specificity and data efficiency in typo tolerant spell checkers: the case of search in online marketplaces

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Typographical errors are a major source of frustration for visitors of online marketplaces. Because of the domain-specific nature of these marketplaces and the very short queries users tend to search for, traditional spell cheking solutions do not perform well in correcting typos. We present a data augmentation method to address the lack of annotated typo data and train a recurrent neural network to learn context-limited domain-specific embeddings. Those embeddings are deployed in a real-time inferencing API for the Microsoft AppSource marketplace to find the closest match between a misspelled user query and the available product names. Our data efficient solution shows that controlled high quality synthetic data may be a powerful tool especially considering the current climate of large language models which rely on prohibitively huge and often uncontrolled datasets.


Comparing Google's AI Speech Recognition To Human Captioning For Television News

#artificialintelligence

Most television stations still rely on human transcription to generate the closed captioning for their live broadcasts. Yet even with the benefit of human fluency, this captioning can vary wildly in quality, even within the same broadcast, from a nearly flawless rendition to near-gibberish. At the same time, automatic speech recognition has historically struggled to achieve sufficient accuracy to entirely replace human transcription. Using a week of television news from the Internet Archive's Television News Archive, how does the station-provided primarily human-created closed captioning compare with machine-generated transcripts generated by Google's Cloud Speech-to-Text API? Automated high-quality captioning of live video represents one of the holy grails of machine speech recognition. While machine captioning systems have improved dramatically over the years, there has still been a substantial gap holding them back from fully matching human accuracy.