Daily Papers

The milestone improvements brought about by deep representation learning and pre-training techniques have led to large performance gains across downstream NLP, IR and Vision tasks. Multimodal modeling techniques aim to leverage large high-quality visio-linguistic datasets for learning complementary information (across image and text modalities). In this paper, we introduce the Wikipedia-based Image Text (WIT) Dataset (https://github.com/google-research-datasets/wit) to better facilitate multimodal, multilingual learning. WIT is composed of a curated set of 37.6 million entity rich image-text examples with 11.5 million unique images across 108 Wikipedia languages. Its size enables WIT to be used as a pretraining dataset for multimodal models, as we show when applied to downstream tasks such as image-text retrieval. WIT has four main and unique advantages. First, WIT is the largest multimodal dataset by the number of image-text examples by 3x (at the time of writing). Second, WIT is massively multilingual (first of its kind) with coverage over 100+ languages (each of which has at least 12K examples) and provides cross-lingual texts for many images. Third, WIT represents a more diverse set of concepts and real world entities relative to what previous datasets cover. Lastly, WIT provides a very challenging real-world test set, as we empirically illustrate using an image-text retrieval task as an example.

As free online encyclopedias with massive volumes of content, Wikipedia and Wikidata are key to many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as information retrieval, knowledge base building, machine translation, text classification, and text summarization. In this paper, we introduce WikiDes, a novel dataset to generate short descriptions of Wikipedia articles for the problem of text summarization. The dataset consists of over 80k English samples on 6987 topics. We set up a two-phase summarization method - description generation (Phase I) and candidate ranking (Phase II) - as a strong approach that relies on transfer and contrastive learning. For description generation, T5 and BART show their superiority compared to other small-scale pre-trained models. By applying contrastive learning with the diverse input from beam search, the metric fusion-based ranking models outperform the direct description generation models significantly up to 22 ROUGE in topic-exclusive split and topic-independent split. Furthermore, the outcome descriptions in Phase II are supported by human evaluation in over 45.33% chosen compared to 23.66% in Phase I against the gold descriptions. In the aspect of sentiment analysis, the generated descriptions cannot effectively capture all sentiment polarities from paragraphs while doing this task better from the gold descriptions. The automatic generation of new descriptions reduces the human efforts in creating them and enriches Wikidata-based knowledge graphs. Our paper shows a practical impact on Wikipedia and Wikidata since there are thousands of missing descriptions. Finally, we expect WikiDes to be a useful dataset for related works in capturing salient information from short paragraphs. The curated dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/declare-lab/WikiDes.

Fact-checking is essential due to the explosion of misinformation in the media ecosystem. Although false information exists in every language and country, most research to solve the problem mainly concentrated on huge communities like English and Chinese. Low-resource languages like Vietnamese are necessary to explore corpora and models for fact verification. To bridge this gap, we construct ViWikiFC, the first manual annotated open-domain corpus for Vietnamese Wikipedia Fact Checking more than 20K claims generated by converting evidence sentences extracted from Wikipedia articles. We analyze our corpus through many linguistic aspects, from the new dependency rate, the new n-gram rate, and the new word rate. We conducted various experiments for Vietnamese fact-checking, including evidence retrieval and verdict prediction. BM25 and InfoXLM (Large) achieved the best results in two tasks, with BM25 achieving an accuracy of 88.30% for SUPPORTS, 86.93% for REFUTES, and only 56.67% for the NEI label in the evidence retrieval task, InfoXLM (Large) achieved an F1 score of 86.51%. Furthermore, we also conducted a pipeline approach, which only achieved a strict accuracy of 67.00% when using InfoXLM (Large) and BM25. These results demonstrate that our dataset is challenging for the Vietnamese language model in fact-checking tasks.

Hoaxes are a recognised form of disinformation created deliberately, with potential serious implications in the credibility of reference knowledge resources such as Wikipedia. What makes detecting Wikipedia hoaxes hard is that they often are written according to the official style guidelines. In this work, we first provide a systematic analysis of the similarities and discrepancies between legitimate and hoax Wikipedia articles, and introduce Hoaxpedia, a collection of 311 Hoax articles (from existing literature as well as official Wikipedia lists) alongside semantically similar real articles. We report results of binary classification experiments in the task of predicting whether a Wikipedia article is real or hoax, and analyze several settings as well as a range of language models. Our results suggest that detecting deceitful content in Wikipedia based on content alone, despite not having been explored much in the past, is a promising direction.

Many natural language processing and information retrieval problems can be formalized as the task of semantic matching. Existing work in this area has been largely focused on matching between short texts (e.g., question answering), or between a short and a long text (e.g., ad-hoc retrieval). Semantic matching between long-form documents, which has many important applications like news recommendation, related article recommendation and document clustering, is relatively less explored and needs more research effort. In recent years, self-attention based models like Transformers and BERT have achieved state-of-the-art performance in the task of text matching. These models, however, are still limited to short text like a few sentences or one paragraph due to the quadratic computational complexity of self-attention with respect to input text length. In this paper, we address the issue by proposing the Siamese Multi-depth Transformer-based Hierarchical (SMITH) Encoder for long-form document matching. Our model contains several innovations to adapt self-attention models for longer text input. In order to better capture sentence level semantic relations within a document, we pre-train the model with a novel masked sentence block language modeling task in addition to the masked word language modeling task used by BERT. Our experimental results on several benchmark datasets for long-form document matching show that our proposed SMITH model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models including hierarchical attention, multi-depth attention-based hierarchical recurrent neural network, and BERT. Comparing to BERT based baselines, our model is able to increase maximum input text length from 512 to 2048. We will open source a Wikipedia based benchmark dataset, code and a pre-trained checkpoint to accelerate future research on long-form document matching.

Generative retrieval (Wang et al., 2022; Tay et al., 2022) is a popular approach for end-to-end document retrieval that directly generates document identifiers given an input query. We introduce summarization-based document IDs, in which each document's ID is composed of an extractive summary or abstractive keyphrases generated by a language model, rather than an integer ID sequence or bags of n-grams as proposed in past work. We find that abstractive, content-based IDs (ACID) and an ID based on the first 30 tokens are very effective in direct comparisons with previous approaches to ID creation. We show that using ACID improves top-10 and top-20 recall by 15.6% and 14.4% (relative) respectively versus the cluster-based integer ID baseline on the MSMARCO 100k retrieval task, and 9.8% and 9.9% respectively on the Wikipedia-based NQ 100k retrieval task. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of human-readable, natural-language IDs created through summarization for generative retrieval. We also observed that extractive IDs outperformed abstractive IDs on Wikipedia articles in NQ but not the snippets in MSMARCO, which suggests that document characteristics affect generative retrieval performance.

Existing question answering (QA) datasets fail to train QA systems to perform complex reasoning and provide explanations for answers. We introduce HotpotQA, a new dataset with 113k Wikipedia-based question-answer pairs with four key features: (1) the questions require finding and reasoning over multiple supporting documents to answer; (2) the questions are diverse and not constrained to any pre-existing knowledge bases or knowledge schemas; (3) we provide sentence-level supporting facts required for reasoning, allowing QA systems to reason with strong supervision and explain the predictions; (4) we offer a new type of factoid comparison questions to test QA systems' ability to extract relevant facts and perform necessary comparison. We show that HotpotQA is challenging for the latest QA systems, and the supporting facts enable models to improve performance and make explainable predictions.

Retrieval Augment Generation (RAG) is a recent advancement in Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA). RAG has only been trained and explored with a Wikipedia-based external knowledge base and is not optimized for use in other specialized domains such as healthcare and news. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of joint training of the retriever and generator components of RAG for the task of domain adaptation in ODQA. We propose RAG-end2end, an extension to RAG, that can adapt to a domain-specific knowledge base by updating all components of the external knowledge base during training. In addition, we introduce an auxiliary training signal to inject more domain-specific knowledge. This auxiliary signal forces RAG-end2end to reconstruct a given sentence by accessing the relevant information from the external knowledge base. Our novel contribution is unlike RAG, RAG-end2end does joint training of the retriever and generator for the end QA task and domain adaptation. We evaluate our approach with datasets from three domains: COVID-19, News, and Conversations, and achieve significant performance improvements compared to the original RAG model. Our work has been open-sourced through the Huggingface Transformers library, attesting to our work's credibility and technical consistency.

Despite recent advances in large language models (LLMs), most QA benchmarks are still confined to single-paragraph or single-document settings, failing to capture the complexity of real-world information-seeking tasks. Practical QA often requires multi-hop reasoning over information distributed across multiple documents, modalities, and structural formats. Although prior datasets made progress in this area, they rely heavily on Wikipedia-based content and unimodal plain text, with shallow reasoning paths that typically produce brief phrase-level or single-sentence answers, thus limiting their realism and generalizability. We propose DocHop-QA, a large-scale benchmark comprising 11,379 QA instances for multimodal, multi-document, multi-hop question answering. Constructed from publicly available scientific documents sourced from PubMed, DocHop-QA is domain-agnostic and incorporates diverse information formats, including textual passages, tables, and structural layout cues. Unlike existing datasets, DocHop-QA does not rely on explicitly hyperlinked documents; instead, it supports open-ended reasoning through semantic similarity and layout-aware evidence synthesis. To scale realistic QA construction, we designed an LLM-driven pipeline grounded in 11 high-frequency scientific question concepts. We evaluated DocHop-QA through four tasks spanning structured index prediction, generative answering, and multimodal integration, reflecting both discriminative and generative paradigms. These tasks demonstrate DocHop-QA's capacity to support complex, multimodal reasoning across multiple documents.

Extending context windows (i.e., Long Context, LC) and using retrievers to selectively access relevant information (i.e., Retrieval-Augmented Generation, RAG) are the two main strategies to enable LLMs to incorporate extremely long external contexts. This paper revisits recent studies on this topic, highlighting their key insights and discrepancies. We then provide a more comprehensive evaluation by filtering out questions answerable without external context, identifying the most effective retrieval methods, and expanding the datasets. We show that LC generally outperforms RAG in question-answering benchmarks, especially for Wikipedia-based questions. Summarization-based retrieval performs comparably to LC, while chunk-based retrieval lags behind. However, RAG has advantages in dialogue-based and general question queries. These insights underscore the trade-offs between RAG and LC strategies, offering guidance for future optimization of LLMs with external knowledge sources. We also provide an in-depth discussion on this topic, highlighting the overlooked importance of context relevance in existing studies.

In order to address increasing demands of real-world applications, the research for knowledge-intensive NLP (KI-NLP) should advance by capturing the challenges of a truly open-domain environment: web-scale knowledge, lack of structure, inconsistent quality and noise. To this end, we propose a new setup for evaluating existing knowledge intensive tasks in which we generalize the background corpus to a universal web snapshot. We investigate a slate of NLP tasks which rely on knowledge - either factual or common sense, and ask systems to use a subset of CCNet - the Sphere corpus - as a knowledge source. In contrast to Wikipedia, otherwise a common background corpus in KI-NLP, Sphere is orders of magnitude larger and better reflects the full diversity of knowledge on the web. Despite potential gaps in coverage, challenges of scale, lack of structure and lower quality, we find that retrieval from Sphere enables a state of the art system to match and even outperform Wikipedia-based models on several tasks. We also observe that while a dense index can outperform a sparse BM25 baseline on Wikipedia, on Sphere this is not yet possible. To facilitate further research and minimise the community's reliance on proprietary, black-box search engines, we share our indices, evaluation metrics and infrastructure.

Wikipedia can easily be justified as a behemoth, considering the sheer volume of content that is added or removed every minute to its several projects. This creates an immense scope, in the field of natural language processing towards developing automated tools for content moderation and review. In this paper we propose Self Attentive Revision Encoder (StRE) which leverages orthographic similarity of lexical units toward predicting the quality of new edits. In contrast to existing propositions which primarily employ features like page reputation, editor activity or rule based heuristics, we utilize the textual content of the edits which, we believe contains superior signatures of their quality. More specifically, we deploy deep encoders to generate representations of the edits from its text content, which we then leverage to infer quality. We further contribute a novel dataset containing 21M revisions across 32K Wikipedia pages and demonstrate that StRE outperforms existing methods by a significant margin at least 17% and at most 103%. Our pretrained model achieves such result after retraining on a set as small as 20% of the edits in a wikipage. This, to the best of our knowledge, is also the first attempt towards employing deep language models to the enormous domain of automated content moderation and review in Wikipedia.

Despite significant advances in large language models (LLMs), their knowledge memorization capabilities remain underexplored, due to the lack of standardized and high-quality test ground. In this paper, we introduce a novel, real-world and large-scale knowledge injection benchmark that evolves continuously over time without requiring human intervention. Specifically, we propose WikiDYK, which leverages recently-added and human-written facts from Wikipedia's "Did You Know..." entries. These entries are carefully selected by expert Wikipedia editors based on criteria such as verifiability and clarity. Each entry is converted into multiple question-answer pairs spanning diverse task formats from easy cloze prompts to complex multi-hop questions. WikiDYK contains 12,290 facts and 77,180 questions, which is also seamlessly extensible with future updates from Wikipedia editors. Extensive experiments using continued pre-training reveal a surprising insight: despite their prevalence in modern LLMs, Causal Language Models (CLMs) demonstrate significantly weaker knowledge memorization capabilities compared to Bidirectional Language Models (BiLMs), exhibiting a 23% lower accuracy in terms of reliability. To compensate for the smaller scales of current BiLMs, we introduce a modular collaborative framework utilizing ensembles of BiLMs as external knowledge repositories to integrate with LLMs. Experiment shows that our framework further improves the reliability accuracy by up to 29.1%.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) addresses the unseen class recognition problem by leveraging semantic information to transfer knowledge from seen classes to unseen classes. Generative models synthesize the unseen visual features and convert ZSL into a classical supervised learning problem. These generative models are trained using the seen classes and are expected to implicitly transfer the knowledge from seen to unseen classes. However, their performance is stymied by overfitting, which leads to substandard performance on Generalized Zero-Shot learning (GZSL). To address this concern, we propose the novel LsrGAN, a generative model that Leverages the Semantic Relationship between seen and unseen categories and explicitly performs knowledge transfer by incorporating a novel Semantic Regularized Loss (SR-Loss). The SR-loss guides the LsrGAN to generate visual features that mirror the semantic relationships between seen and unseen classes. Experiments on seven benchmark datasets, including the challenging Wikipedia text-based CUB and NABirds splits, and Attribute-based AWA, CUB, and SUN, demonstrates the superiority of the LsrGAN compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches under both ZSL and GZSL. Code is available at https: // github. com/ Maunil/ LsrGAN

Corpora that contain tabular data such as WebTables are a vital resource for the academic community. Essentially, they are the backbone of any modern research in information management. They are used for various tasks of data extraction, knowledge base construction, question answering, column semantic type detection and many other. Such corpora are useful not only as a source of data, but also as a base for building test datasets. So far, there were no such corpora for the Russian language and this seriously hindered research in the aforementioned areas. In this paper, we present the first corpus of Web tables created specifically out of Russian language material. It was built via a special toolkit we have developed to crawl the Russian Wikipedia. Both the corpus and the toolkit are open-source and publicly available. Finally, we present a short study that describes Russian Wikipedia tables and their statistics.

In this paper, we present a thorough analysis of the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) on Wikipedia, examining the evolution of Wikipedia through existing data and using simulations to explore potential risks. We begin by analyzing page views and article content to study Wikipedia's recent changes and assess the impact of LLMs. Subsequently, we evaluate how LLMs affect various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks related to Wikipedia, including machine translation and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Our findings and simulation results reveal that Wikipedia articles have been influenced by LLMs, with an impact of approximately 1%-2% in certain categories. If the machine translation benchmark based on Wikipedia is influenced by LLMs, the scores of the models may become inflated, and the comparative results among models might shift as well. Moreover, the effectiveness of RAG might decrease if the knowledge base becomes polluted by LLM-generated content. While LLMs have not yet fully changed Wikipedia's language and knowledge structures, we believe that our empirical findings signal the need for careful consideration of potential future risks.

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) has increased significantly with users frequently asking questions to chatbots. In the time when information is readily accessible, it is crucial to stimulate and preserve human cognitive abilities and maintain strong reasoning skills. This paper addresses such challenges by promoting the use of hints as an alternative or a supplement to direct answers. We first introduce a manually constructed hint dataset, WikiHint, which is based on Wikipedia and includes 5,000 hints created for 1,000 questions. We then finetune open-source LLMs such as LLaMA-3.1 for hint generation in answer-aware and answeragnostic contexts. We assess the effectiveness of the hints with human participants who answer questions with and without the aid of hints. Additionally, we introduce a lightweight evaluation method, HintRank, to evaluate and rank hints in both answeraware and answer-agnostic settings. Our findings show that (a) the dataset helps generate more effective hints, (b) including answer information along with questions generally improves quality of generated hints, and (c) encoder-based models perform better than decoder-based models in hint ranking.

The transformer-based pre-trained language model BERT has helped to improve state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Using the same architecture and parameters, we developed and evaluated a monolingual Dutch BERT model called BERTje. Compared to the multilingual BERT model, which includes Dutch but is only based on Wikipedia text, BERTje is based on a large and diverse dataset of 2.4 billion tokens. BERTje consistently outperforms the equally-sized multilingual BERT model on downstream NLP tasks (part-of-speech tagging, named-entity recognition, semantic role labeling, and sentiment analysis). Our pre-trained Dutch BERT model is made available at https://github.com/wietsedv/bertje.

Language models (LMs) increasingly drive real-world applications that require world knowledge. However, the internal processes through which models turn data into representations of knowledge and beliefs about the world, are poorly understood. Insights into these processes could pave the way for developing LMs with knowledge representations that are more consistent, robust, and complete. To facilitate studying these questions, we present LMEnt, a suite for analyzing knowledge acquisition in LMs during pretraining. LMEnt introduces: (1) a knowledge-rich pretraining corpus, fully annotated with entity mentions, based on Wikipedia, (2) an entity-based retrieval method over pretraining data that outperforms previous approaches by as much as 80.4%, and (3) 12 pretrained models with up to 1B parameters and 4K intermediate checkpoints, with comparable performance to popular open-sourced models on knowledge benchmarks. Together, these resources provide a controlled environment for analyzing connections between entity mentions in pretraining and downstream performance, and the effects of causal interventions in pretraining data. We show the utility of LMEnt by studying knowledge acquisition across checkpoints, finding that fact frequency is key, but does not fully explain learning trends. We release LMEnt to support studies of knowledge in LMs, including knowledge representations, plasticity, editing, attribution, and learning dynamics.

Wikipedia articles (content pages) are commonly used corpora in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, especially in low-resource languages other than English. Yet, a few research studies have studied the three Arabic Wikipedia editions, Arabic Wikipedia (AR), Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia (ARZ), and Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia (ARY), and documented issues in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia edition regarding the massive automatic creation of its articles using template-based translation from English to Arabic without human involvement, overwhelming the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia with articles that do not only have low-quality content but also with articles that do not represent the Egyptian people, their culture, and their dialect. In this paper, we aim to mitigate the problem of template translation that occurred in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia by identifying these template-translated articles and their characteristics through exploratory analysis and building automatic detection systems. We first explore the content of the three Arabic Wikipedia editions in terms of density, quality, and human contributions and utilize the resulting insights to build multivariate machine learning classifiers leveraging articles' metadata to detect the template-translated articles automatically. We then publicly deploy and host the best-performing classifier, XGBoost, as an online application called EGYPTIAN WIKIPEDIA SCANNER and release the extracted, filtered, and labeled datasets to the research community to benefit from our datasets and the online, web-based detection system.

Verifiability is a core content policy of Wikipedia: claims that are likely to be challenged need to be backed by citations. There are millions of articles available online and thousands of new articles are released each month. For this reason, finding relevant sources is a difficult task: many claims do not have any references that support them. Furthermore, even existing citations might not support a given claim or become obsolete once the original source is updated or deleted. Hence, maintaining and improving the quality of Wikipedia references is an important challenge and there is a pressing need for better tools to assist humans in this effort. Here, we show that the process of improving references can be tackled with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). We develop a neural network based system, called Side, to identify Wikipedia citations that are unlikely to support their claims, and subsequently recommend better ones from the web. We train this model on existing Wikipedia references, therefore learning from the contributions and combined wisdom of thousands of Wikipedia editors. Using crowd-sourcing, we observe that for the top 10% most likely citations to be tagged as unverifiable by our system, humans prefer our system's suggested alternatives compared to the originally cited reference 70% of the time. To validate the applicability of our system, we built a demo to engage with the English-speaking Wikipedia community and find that Side's first citation recommendation collects over 60% more preferences than existing Wikipedia citations for the same top 10% most likely unverifiable claims according to Side. Our results indicate that an AI-based system could be used, in tandem with humans, to improve the verifiability of Wikipedia. More generally, we hope that our work can be used to assist fact checking efforts and increase the general trustworthiness of information online.

Crossword puzzles are popular linguistic games often used as tools to engage students in learning. Educational crosswords are characterized by less cryptic and more factual clues that distinguish them from traditional crossword puzzles. Despite there exist several publicly available clue-answer pair databases for traditional crosswords, educational clue-answer pairs datasets are missing. In this article, we propose a methodology to build educational clue generation datasets that can be used to instruct Large Language Models (LLMs). By gathering from Wikipedia pages informative content associated with relevant keywords, we use Large Language Models to automatically generate pedagogical clues related to the given input keyword and its context. With such an approach, we created clue-instruct, a dataset containing 44,075 unique examples with text-keyword pairs associated with three distinct crossword clues. We used clue-instruct to instruct different LLMs to generate educational clues from a given input content and keyword. Both human and automatic evaluations confirmed the quality of the generated clues, thus validating the effectiveness of our approach.

This paper proposes to tackle open- domain question answering using Wikipedia as the unique knowledge source: the answer to any factoid question is a text span in a Wikipedia article. This task of machine reading at scale combines the challenges of document retrieval (finding the relevant articles) with that of machine comprehension of text (identifying the answer spans from those articles). Our approach combines a search component based on bigram hashing and TF-IDF matching with a multi-layer recurrent neural network model trained to detect answers in Wikipedia paragraphs. Our experiments on multiple existing QA datasets indicate that (1) both modules are highly competitive with respect to existing counterparts and (2) multitask learning using distant supervision on their combination is an effective complete system on this challenging task.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in multi-turn conversational tasks, yet their pre-training data predominantly consists of continuous prose, creating a potential mismatch between required capabilities and training paradigms. We introduce a novel approach to address this discrepancy by synthesizing conversational data from existing text corpora. We present a pipeline that transforms a cluster of multiple related documents into an extended multi-turn, multi-topic information-seeking dialogue. Applying our pipeline to Wikipedia articles, we curate DocTalk, a multi-turn pre-training dialogue corpus consisting of over 730k long conversations. We hypothesize that exposure to such synthesized conversational structures during pre-training can enhance the fundamental multi-turn capabilities of LLMs, such as context memory and understanding. Empirically, we show that incorporating DocTalk during pre-training results in up to 40% gain in context memory and understanding, without compromising base performance. DocTalk is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/AmazonScience/DocTalk.

Wikipedia is an invaluable resource for factual information about a wide range of entities. However, the quality of articles on less-known entities often lags behind that of the well-known ones. This study proposes a novel approach to enhancing Wikipedia's B and C category biography articles by leveraging personal narratives such as autobiographies and biographies. By utilizing a multi-staged retrieval-augmented generation technique -- REVerSum -- we aim to enrich the informational content of these lesser-known articles. Our study reveals that personal narratives can significantly improve the quality of Wikipedia articles, providing a rich source of reliable information that has been underutilized in previous studies. Based on crowd-based evaluation, REVerSum generated content outperforms the best performing baseline by 17% in terms of integrability to the original Wikipedia article and 28.5\% in terms of informativeness. Code and Data are available at: https://github.com/sayantan11995/wikipedia_enrichment

Large-scale multi-modal pre-training models such as CLIP and PaLI exhibit strong generalization on various visual domains and tasks. However, existing image classification benchmarks often evaluate recognition on a specific domain (e.g., outdoor images) or a specific task (e.g., classifying plant species), which falls short of evaluating whether pre-trained foundational models are universal visual recognizers. To address this, we formally present the task of Open-domain Visual Entity recognitioN (OVEN), where a model need to link an image onto a Wikipedia entity with respect to a text query. We construct OVEN-Wiki by re-purposing 14 existing datasets with all labels grounded onto one single label space: Wikipedia entities. OVEN challenges models to select among six million possible Wikipedia entities, making it a general visual recognition benchmark with the largest number of labels. Our study on state-of-the-art pre-trained models reveals large headroom in generalizing to the massive-scale label space. We show that a PaLI-based auto-regressive visual recognition model performs surprisingly well, even on Wikipedia entities that have never been seen during fine-tuning. We also find existing pretrained models yield different strengths: while PaLI-based models obtain higher overall performance, CLIP-based models are better at recognizing tail entities.

Although the great success of open-domain dialogue generation, unseen entities can have a large impact on the dialogue generation task. It leads to performance degradation of the model in the dialog generation. Previous researches used retrieved knowledge of seen entities as the auxiliary data to enhance the representation of the model. Nevertheless, logical explanation of unseen entities remains unexplored, such as possible co-occurrence or semantically similar words of them and their entity category. In this work, we propose an approach to address the challenge above. We construct a graph by extracting entity nodes in them, enhancing the representation of the context of the unseen entity with the entity's 1-hop surrounding nodes. Furthermore, We added the named entity tag prediction task to apply the problem that the unseen entity does not exist in the graph. We conduct our experiments on an open dataset Wizard of Wikipedia and the empirical results indicate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on Wizard of Wikipedia.

Contextual spelling correction models are an alternative to shallow fusion to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) quality given user vocabulary. To deal with large user vocabularies, most of these models include candidate retrieval mechanisms, usually based on minimum edit distance between fragments of ASR hypothesis and user phrases. However, the edit-distance approach is slow, non-trainable, and may have low recall as it relies only on common letters. We propose: 1) a novel algorithm for candidate retrieval, based on misspelled n-gram mappings, which gives up to 90% recall with just the top 10 candidates on Spoken Wikipedia; 2) a non-autoregressive neural model based on BERT architecture, where the initial transcript and ten candidates are combined into one input. The experiments on Spoken Wikipedia show 21.4% word error rate improvement compared to a baseline ASR system.

We present an approach based on multilingual sentence embeddings to automatically extract parallel sentences from the content of Wikipedia articles in 85 languages, including several dialects or low-resource languages. We do not limit the the extraction process to alignments with English, but systematically consider all possible language pairs. In total, we are able to extract 135M parallel sentences for 1620 different language pairs, out of which only 34M are aligned with English. This corpus of parallel sentences is freely available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LASER/tree/master/tasks/WikiMatrix. To get an indication on the quality of the extracted bitexts, we train neural MT baseline systems on the mined data only for 1886 languages pairs, and evaluate them on the TED corpus, achieving strong BLEU scores for many language pairs. The WikiMatrix bitexts seem to be particularly interesting to train MT systems between distant languages without the need to pivot through English.

This paper presents the first few-shot LLM-based chatbot that almost never hallucinates and has high conversationality and low latency. WikiChat is grounded on the English Wikipedia, the largest curated free-text corpus. WikiChat generates a response from an LLM, retains only the grounded facts, and combines them with additional information it retrieves from the corpus to form factual and engaging responses. We distill WikiChat based on GPT-4 into a 7B-parameter LLaMA model with minimal loss of quality, to significantly improve its latency, cost and privacy, and facilitate research and deployment. Using a novel hybrid human-and-LLM evaluation methodology, we show that our best system achieves 97.3% factual accuracy in simulated conversations. It significantly outperforms all retrieval-based and LLM-based baselines, and by 3.9%, 38.6% and 51.0% on head, tail and recent knowledge compared to GPT-4. Compared to previous state-of-the-art retrieval-based chatbots, WikiChat is also significantly more informative and engaging, just like an LLM. WikiChat achieves 97.9% factual accuracy in conversations with human users about recent topics, 55.0% better than GPT-4, while receiving significantly higher user ratings and more favorable comments.

Sentence fusion is the task of joining several independent sentences into a single coherent text. Current datasets for sentence fusion are small and insufficient for training modern neural models. In this paper, we propose a method for automatically-generating fusion examples from raw text and present DiscoFuse, a large scale dataset for discourse-based sentence fusion. We author a set of rules for identifying a diverse set of discourse phenomena in raw text, and decomposing the text into two independent sentences. We apply our approach on two document collections: Wikipedia and Sports articles, yielding 60 million fusion examples annotated with discourse information required to reconstruct the fused text. We develop a sequence-to-sequence model on DiscoFuse and thoroughly analyze its strengths and weaknesses with respect to the various discourse phenomena, using both automatic as well as human evaluation. Finally, we conduct transfer learning experiments with WebSplit, a recent dataset for text simplification. We show that pretraining on DiscoFuse substantially improves performance on WebSplit when viewed as a sentence fusion task.

The embeddings of entities in a large knowledge base (e.g., Wikipedia) are highly beneficial for solving various natural language tasks that involve real world knowledge. In this paper, we present Wikipedia2Vec, a Python-based open-source tool for learning the embeddings of words and entities from Wikipedia. The proposed tool enables users to learn the embeddings efficiently by issuing a single command with a Wikipedia dump file as an argument. We also introduce a web-based demonstration of our tool that allows users to visualize and explore the learned embeddings. In our experiments, our tool achieved a state-of-the-art result on the KORE entity relatedness dataset, and competitive results on various standard benchmark datasets. Furthermore, our tool has been used as a key component in various recent studies. We publicize the source code, demonstration, and the pretrained embeddings for 12 languages at https://wikipedia2vec.github.io.

Wikipedia is the largest open knowledge corpus, widely used worldwide and serving as a key resource for training large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. Ensuring its accuracy is therefore critical. But how accurate is Wikipedia, and how can we improve it? We focus on inconsistencies, a specific type of factual inaccuracy, and introduce the task of corpus-level inconsistency detection. We present CLAIRE, an agentic system that combines LLM reasoning with retrieval to surface potentially inconsistent claims along with contextual evidence for human review. In a user study with experienced Wikipedia editors, 87.5% reported higher confidence when using CLAIRE, and participants identified 64.7% more inconsistencies in the same amount of time. Combining CLAIRE with human annotation, we contribute WIKICOLLIDE, the first benchmark of real Wikipedia inconsistencies. Using random sampling with CLAIRE-assisted analysis, we find that at least 3.3% of English Wikipedia facts contradict another fact, with inconsistencies propagating into 7.3% of FEVEROUS and 4.0% of AmbigQA examples. Benchmarking strong baselines on this dataset reveals substantial headroom: the best fully automated system achieves an AUROC of only 75.1%. Our results show that contradictions are a measurable component of Wikipedia and that LLM-based systems like CLAIRE can provide a practical tool to help editors improve knowledge consistency at scale.

Aspect or query-based summarization has recently caught more attention, as it can generate differentiated summaries based on users' interests. However, the current dataset for aspect or query-based summarization either focuses on specific domains, contains relatively small-scale instances, or includes only a few aspect types. Such limitations hinder further explorations in this direction. In this work, we take advantage of crowd-sourcing knowledge on Wikipedia.org and automatically create a high-quality, large-scale open-domain aspect-based summarization dataset named OASum, which contains more than 3.7 million instances with around 1 million different aspects on 2 million Wikipedia pages. We provide benchmark results on OASum and demonstrate its ability for diverse aspect-based summarization generation. To overcome the data scarcity problem on specific domains, we also perform zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning on seven downstream datasets. Specifically, zero/few-shot and fine-tuning results show that the model pre-trained on our corpus demonstrates a strong aspect or query-focused generation ability compared with the backbone model. Our dataset and pre-trained checkpoints are publicly available.

In recent years, research on visual document understanding (VDU) has grown significantly, with a particular emphasis on the development of self-supervised learning methods. However, one of the significant challenges faced in this field is the limited availability of publicly accessible visual corpora or extensive collections of images with detailed text annotations, particularly for non-Latin or resource-scarce languages. To address this challenge, we propose Web-based Visual Corpus Builder (Webvicob), a dataset generator engine capable of constructing large-scale, multilingual visual corpora from raw Wikipedia HTML dumps. Our experiments demonstrate that the data generated by Webvicob can be used to train robust VDU models that perform well on various downstream tasks, such as DocVQA and post-OCR parsing. Furthermore, when using a dataset of 1 million images generated by Webvicob, we observed an improvement of over 13% on the DocVQA Task 3 compared to a dataset of 11 million images from the IIT-CDIP. The implementation of our engine is publicly available on https://github.com/clovaai/webvicob

Robust automatic fact-checking systems have the potential to combat online misinformation at scale. However, most existing research primarily focuses on English. In this paper, we introduce MultiSynFact, the first large-scale multilingual fact-checking dataset containing 2.2M claim-source pairs designed to support Spanish, German, English, and other low-resource languages. Our dataset generation pipeline leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), integrating external knowledge from Wikipedia and incorporating rigorous claim validation steps to ensure data quality. We evaluate the effectiveness of MultiSynFact across multiple models and experimental settings. Additionally, we open-source a user-friendly framework to facilitate further research in multilingual fact-checking and dataset generation.

Large language models (LLMs) face the challenge of hallucinations -- outputs that seem coherent but are actually incorrect. A particularly damaging type is fact-conflicting hallucination (FCH), where generated content contradicts established facts. Addressing FCH presents three main challenges: 1) Automatically constructing and maintaining large-scale benchmark datasets is difficult and resource-intensive; 2) Generating complex and efficient test cases that the LLM has not been trained on -- especially those involving intricate temporal features -- is challenging, yet crucial for eliciting hallucinations; and 3) Validating the reasoning behind LLM outputs is inherently difficult, particularly with complex logical relationships, as it requires transparency in the model's decision-making process. This paper presents Drowzee, an innovative end-to-end metamorphic testing framework that utilizes temporal logic to identify fact-conflicting hallucinations (FCH) in large language models (LLMs). Drowzee builds a comprehensive factual knowledge base by crawling sources like Wikipedia and uses automated temporal-logic reasoning to convert this knowledge into a large, extensible set of test cases with ground truth answers. LLMs are tested using these cases through template-based prompts, which require them to generate both answers and reasoning steps. To validate the reasoning, we propose two semantic-aware oracles that compare the semantic structure of LLM outputs to the ground truths. Across nine LLMs in nine different knowledge domains, experimental results show that Drowzee effectively identifies rates of non-temporal-related hallucinations ranging from 24.7% to 59.8%, and rates of temporal-related hallucinations ranging from 16.7% to 39.2%.

In recent times training Language Models (LMs) have relied on computationally heavy training over massive datasets which makes this training process extremely laborious. In this paper we propose a novel method for numerically evaluating text quality in large unlabelled NLP datasets in a model agnostic manner to assign the text instances a "quality score". By proposing the text quality metric, the paper establishes a framework to identify and eliminate low-quality text instances, leading to improved training efficiency for LM models. Experimental results over multiple models and datasets demonstrate the efficacy of this approach, showcasing substantial gains in training effectiveness and highlighting the potential for resource-efficient LM training. For example, we observe an absolute accuracy improvement of 0.9% averaged over 14 downstream evaluation tasks for multiple LM models while using 40% lesser data and training 42% faster when training on the OpenWebText dataset and 0.8% average absolute accuracy improvement while using 20% lesser data and training 21% faster on the Wikipedia dataset.

One of the main tasks of Natural Language Processing (NLP), is Named Entity Recognition (NER). It is used in many applications and also can be used as an intermediate step for other tasks. We present ANER, a web-based named entity recognizer for the Arabic, and Arabizi languages. The model is built upon BERT, which is a transformer-based encoder. It can recognize 50 different entity classes, covering various fields. We trained our model on the WikiFANE\_Gold dataset which consists of Wikipedia articles. We achieved an F1 score of 88.7\%, which beats CAMeL Tools' F1 score of 83\% on the ANERcorp dataset, which has only 4 classes. We also got an F1 score of 77.7\% on the NewsFANE\_Gold dataset which contains out-of-domain data from News articles. The system is deployed on a user-friendly web interface that accepts users' inputs in Arabic, or Arabizi. It allows users to explore the entities in the text by highlighting them. It can also direct users to get information about entities through Wikipedia directly. We added the ability to do NER using our model, or CAMeL Tools' model through our website. ANER is publicly accessible at http://www.aner.online. We also deployed our model on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/boda/ANER, to allow developers to test and use it.

What should a malicious user write next to fool a detection model? Identifying malicious users is critical to ensure the safety and integrity of internet platforms. Several deep learning-based detection models have been created. However, malicious users can evade deep detection models by manipulating their behavior, rendering these models of little use. The vulnerability of such deep detection models against adversarial attacks is unknown. Here we create a novel adversarial attack model against deep user sequence embedding based classification models, which use the sequence of user posts to generate user embeddings and detect malicious users. In the attack, the adversary generates a new post to fool the classifier. We propose a novel end-to-end Personalized Text Generation Attack model, called PETGEN, that simultaneously reduces the efficacy of the detection model and generates posts that have several key desirable properties. Specifically, PETGEN generates posts that are personalized to the user's writing style, have knowledge about a given target context, are aware of the user's historical posts on the target context, and encapsulate the user's recent topical interests. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets (Yelp and Wikipedia, both with ground-truth of malicious users) to show that PETGEN significantly reduces the performance of popular deep user sequence embedding-based classification models. PETGEN outperforms five attack baselines in terms of text quality and attack efficacy in both white-box and black-box classifier settings. Overall, this work paves the path towards the next generation of adversary-aware sequence classification models.

The development of natural language processing (NLP) in general and machine reading comprehension in particular has attracted the great attention of the research community. In recent years, there are a few datasets for machine reading comprehension tasks in Vietnamese with large sizes, such as UIT-ViQuAD and UIT-ViNewsQA. However, the datasets are not diverse in answers to serve the research. In this paper, we introduce UIT-ViWikiQA, the first dataset for evaluating sentence extraction-based machine reading comprehension in the Vietnamese language. The UIT-ViWikiQA dataset is converted from the UIT-ViQuAD dataset, consisting of comprises 23.074 question-answers based on 5.109 passages of 174 Wikipedia Vietnamese articles. We propose a conversion algorithm to create the dataset for sentence extraction-based machine reading comprehension and three types of approaches for sentence extraction-based machine reading comprehension in Vietnamese. Our experiments show that the best machine model is XLM-R_Large, which achieves an exact match (EM) of 85.97% and an F1-score of 88.77% on our dataset. Besides, we analyze experimental results in terms of the question type in Vietnamese and the effect of context on the performance of the MRC models, thereby showing the challenges from the UIT-ViWikiQA dataset that we propose to the language processing community.

Aspect-based summarization is the task of generating focused summaries based on specific points of interest. Such summaries aid efficient analysis of text, such as quickly understanding reviews or opinions from different angles. However, due to large differences in the type of aspects for different domains (e.g., sentiment, product features), the development of previous models has tended to be domain-specific. In this paper, we propose WikiAsp, a large-scale dataset for multi-domain aspect-based summarization that attempts to spur research in the direction of open-domain aspect-based summarization. Specifically, we build the dataset using Wikipedia articles from 20 different domains, using the section titles and boundaries of each article as a proxy for aspect annotation. We propose several straightforward baseline models for this task and conduct experiments on the dataset. Results highlight key challenges that existing summarization models face in this setting, such as proper pronoun handling of quoted sources and consistent explanation of time-sensitive events.

Large-scale pre-trained language models, such as BERT and GPT-2, have achieved excellent performance in language representation learning and free-form text generation. However, these models cannot be directly employed to generate text under specified lexical constraints. To address this challenge, we present POINTER (PrOgressive INsertion-based TransformER), a simple yet novel insertion-based approach for hard-constrained text generation. The proposed method operates by progressively inserting new tokens between existing tokens in a parallel manner. This procedure is recursively applied until a sequence is completed. The resulting coarse-to-fine hierarchy makes the generation process intuitive and interpretable. We pre-train our model with the proposed progressive insertion-based objective on a 12GB Wikipedia dataset, and fine-tune it on downstream hard-constrained generation tasks. Non-autoregressive decoding yields an empirically logarithmic time complexity during inference time. Experimental results on both News and Yelp datasets demonstrate that POINTER achieves state-of-the-art performance on constrained text generation. We released the pre-trained models and the source code to facilitate future research (https://github.com/dreasysnail/POINTER).

For analysing and/or understanding languages having no word boundaries based on morphological analysis such as Japanese, Chinese, and Thai, it is desirable to perform appropriate word segmentation before word embeddings. But it is inherently difficult in these languages. In recent years, various language models based on deep learning have made remarkable progress, and some of these methodologies utilizing character-level features have successfully avoided such a difficult problem. However, when a model is fed character-level features of the above languages, it often causes overfitting due to a large number of character types. In this paper, we propose a CE-CLCNN, character-level convolutional neural networks using a character encoder to tackle these problems. The proposed CE-CLCNN is an end-to-end learning model and has an image-based character encoder, i.e. the CE-CLCNN handles each character in the target document as an image. Through various experiments, we found and confirmed that our CE-CLCNN captured closely embedded features for visually and semantically similar characters and achieves state-of-the-art results on several open document classification tasks. In this paper we report the performance of our CE-CLCNN with the Wikipedia title estimation task and analyse the internal behaviour.

Knowledge discovery and collection are intelligence-intensive tasks that traditionally require significant human effort to ensure high-quality outputs. Recent research has explored multi-agent frameworks for automating Wikipedia-style article generation by retrieving and synthesizing information from the internet. However, these methods primarily focus on text-only generation, overlooking the importance of multimodal content in enhancing informativeness and engagement. In this work, we introduce WikiAutoGen, a novel system for automated multimodal Wikipedia-style article generation. Unlike prior approaches, WikiAutoGen retrieves and integrates relevant images alongside text, enriching both the depth and visual appeal of generated content. To further improve factual accuracy and comprehensiveness, we propose a multi-perspective self-reflection mechanism, which critically assesses retrieved content from diverse viewpoints to enhance reliability, breadth, and coherence, etc. Additionally, we introduce WikiSeek, a benchmark comprising Wikipedia articles with topics paired with both textual and image-based representations, designed to evaluate multimodal knowledge generation on more challenging topics. Experimental results show that WikiAutoGen outperforms previous methods by 8%-29% on our WikiSeek benchmark, producing more accurate, coherent, and visually enriched Wikipedia-style articles. We show some of our generated examples in https://wikiautogen.github.io/ .

Question answering (QA) and Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) tasks have significantly advanced in recent years due to the rapid development of deep learning techniques and, more recently, large language models. At the same time, many benchmark datasets have become available for QA and MRC tasks. However, most existing large-scale benchmark datasets have been created predominantly using synchronous document collections like Wikipedia or the Web. Archival document collections, such as historical newspapers, contain valuable information from the past that is still not widely used to train large language models. To further contribute to advancing QA and MRC tasks and to overcome the limitation of previous datasets, we introduce ChroniclingAmericaQA, a large-scale dataset with 485K question-answer pairs created based on the historical newspaper collection Chronicling America. Our dataset is constructed from a subset of the Chronicling America newspaper collection spanning 120 years. One of the significant challenges for utilizing digitized historical newspaper collections is the low quality of OCR text. Therefore, to enable realistic testing of QA models, our dataset can be used in three different ways: answering questions from raw and noisy content, answering questions from cleaner, corrected version of the content, as well as answering questions from scanned images of newspaper pages. This and the fact that ChroniclingAmericaQA spans the longest time period among available QA datasets make it quite a unique and useful resource.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing, demonstrating strong capabilities in tasks such as text generation, summarization, and reasoning. Recently, their potential for automating precise text editing tasks across specialized domains, such as programming code, LaTeX, and structured database languages, has gained attention. However, current state-of-the-art LLMs still struggle with executing precise, instruction-driven edits, particularly when structural accuracy and strict adherence to domain conventions are required. To address these challenges, we introduce InstrEditBench, an automated benchmark dataset comprising over 30,000 structured editing tasks spanning diverse domains, including Wikipedia articles, LaTeX documents, source code, and database languages. Using this benchmark, we develop FineEdit, a specialized editing model explicitly trained for accurate, context-aware text modifications. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that FineEdit outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving improvements of approximately 10% over Gemini models on single-turn edits, up to 30% over Llama-3.2-3B, and exceeding Mistral-7B-OpenOrca performance by over 40% on direct editing tasks. FineEdit also effectively generalizes to realistic multi-turn editing scenarios, highlighting its practical applicability.

Topic modeling is a well-established technique for exploring text corpora. Conventional topic models (e.g., LDA) represent topics as bags of words that often require "reading the tea leaves" to interpret; additionally, they offer users minimal semantic control over topics. To tackle these issues, we introduce TopicGPT, a prompt-based framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to uncover latent topics within a provided text collection. TopicGPT produces topics that align better with human categorizations compared to competing methods: for example, it achieves a harmonic mean purity of 0.74 against human-annotated Wikipedia topics compared to 0.64 for the strongest baseline. Its topics are also more interpretable, dispensing with ambiguous bags of words in favor of topics with natural language labels and associated free-form descriptions. Moreover, the framework is highly adaptable, allowing users to specify constraints and modify topics without the need for model retraining. TopicGPT can be further extended to hierarchical topical modeling, enabling users to explore topics at various levels of granularity. By streamlining access to high-quality and interpretable topics, TopicGPT represents a compelling, human-centered approach to topic modeling.

We introduce a new Information Extraction (IE) task dubbed Instruction-based IE, which aims to ask the system to follow specific instructions or guidelines to extract information. To facilitate research in this area, we construct a dataset called InstructIE, consisting of 270,000 weakly supervised data from Chinese Wikipedia and 1,000 high-quality crowdsourced annotated instances. We further evaluate the performance of various baseline models on the InstructIE dataset. The results reveal that although current models exhibit promising performance, there is still room for improvement. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive case study analysis, underlining the challenges inherent in the Instruction-based IE task. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zjunlp/DeepKE/tree/main/example/llm.

The problem of verifying whether a textual hypothesis holds based on the given evidence, also known as fact verification, plays an important role in the study of natural language understanding and semantic representation. However, existing studies are mainly restricted to dealing with unstructured evidence (e.g., natural language sentences and documents, news, etc), while verification under structured evidence, such as tables, graphs, and databases, remains under-explored. This paper specifically aims to study the fact verification given semi-structured data as evidence. To this end, we construct a large-scale dataset called TabFact with 16k Wikipedia tables as the evidence for 118k human-annotated natural language statements, which are labeled as either ENTAILED or REFUTED. TabFact is challenging since it involves both soft linguistic reasoning and hard symbolic reasoning. To address these reasoning challenges, we design two different models: Table-BERT and Latent Program Algorithm (LPA). Table-BERT leverages the state-of-the-art pre-trained language model to encode the linearized tables and statements into continuous vectors for verification. LPA parses statements into programs and executes them against the tables to obtain the returned binary value for verification. Both methods achieve similar accuracy but still lag far behind human performance. We also perform a comprehensive analysis to demonstrate great future opportunities. The data and code of the dataset are provided in https://github.com/wenhuchen/Table-Fact-Checking.

This paper treats gender bias latent in word embeddings. Previous mitigation attempts rely on the operationalisation of gender bias as a projection over a linear subspace. An alternative approach is Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA), in which a corpus is duplicated and augmented to remove bias, e.g. by swapping all inherently-gendered words in the copy. We perform an empirical comparison of these approaches on the English Gigaword and Wikipedia, and find that whilst both successfully reduce direct bias and perform well in tasks which quantify embedding quality, CDA variants outperform projection-based methods at the task of drawing non-biased gender analogies by an average of 19% across both corpora. We propose two improvements to CDA: Counterfactual Data Substitution (CDS), a variant of CDA in which potentially biased text is randomly substituted to avoid duplication, and the Names Intervention, a novel name-pairing technique that vastly increases the number of words being treated. CDA/S with the Names Intervention is the only approach which is able to mitigate indirect gender bias: following debiasing, previously biased words are significantly less clustered according to gender (cluster purity is reduced by 49%), thus improving on the state-of-the-art for bias mitigation.

Adapting English-based large language models (LLMs) to other languages has become increasingly popular due to the efficiency and potential of cross-lingual transfer. However, existing language adaptation methods often overlook the benefits of cross-lingual supervision. In this study, we introduce LEIA, a language adaptation tuning method that utilizes Wikipedia entity names aligned across languages. This method involves augmenting the target language corpus with English entity names and training the model using left-to-right language modeling. We assess LEIA on diverse question answering datasets using 7B-parameter LLMs, demonstrating significant performance gains across various non-English languages. The source code is available at https://github.com/studio-ousia/leia.

Classical and some deep learning techniques for Arabic text classification often depend on complex morphological analysis, word segmentation, and hand-crafted feature engineering. These could be eliminated by using character-level features. We propose a novel end-to-end Arabic document classification framework, Arabic document image-based classifier (AraDIC), inspired by the work on image-based character embeddings. AraDIC consists of an image-based character encoder and a classifier. They are trained in an end-to-end fashion using the class balanced loss to deal with the long-tailed data distribution problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of AraDIC, we created and published two datasets, the Arabic Wikipedia title (AWT) dataset and the Arabic poetry (AraP) dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first image-based character embedding framework addressing the problem of Arabic text classification. We also present the first deep learning-based text classifier widely evaluated on modern standard Arabic, colloquial Arabic and classical Arabic. AraDIC shows performance improvement over classical and deep learning baselines by 12.29% and 23.05% for the micro and macro F-score, respectively.

This paper describes the performance of the team cs60075_team2 at SemEval 2021 Task 1 - Lexical Complexity Prediction. The main contribution of this paper is to fine-tune transformer-based language models pre-trained on several text corpora, some being general (E.g., Wikipedia, BooksCorpus), some being the corpora from which the CompLex Dataset was extracted, and others being from other specific domains such as Finance, Law, etc. We perform ablation studies on selecting the transformer models and how their individual complexity scores are aggregated to get the resulting complexity scores. Our method achieves a best Pearson Correlation of 0.784 in sub-task 1 (single word) and 0.836 in sub-task 2 (multiple word expressions).

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution to mitigate the limitations of large language models (LLMs), such as hallucinations and outdated information. However, it remains unclear how LLMs handle knowledge conflicts arising from different augmented retrieved passages, especially when these passages originate from the same source and have equal trustworthiness. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of LLM-generated answers to questions that have varying answers based on contradictory passages from Wikipedia, a dataset widely regarded as a high-quality pre-training resource for most LLMs. Specifically, we introduce WikiContradict, a benchmark consisting of 253 high-quality, human-annotated instances designed to assess LLM performance when augmented with retrieved passages containing real-world knowledge conflicts. We benchmark a diverse range of both closed and open-source LLMs under different QA scenarios, including RAG with a single passage, and RAG with 2 contradictory passages. Through rigorous human evaluations on a subset of WikiContradict instances involving 5 LLMs and over 3,500 judgements, we shed light on the behaviour and limitations of these models. For instance, when provided with two passages containing contradictory facts, all models struggle to generate answers that accurately reflect the conflicting nature of the context, especially for implicit conflicts requiring reasoning. Since human evaluation is costly, we also introduce an automated model that estimates LLM performance using a strong open-source language model, achieving an F-score of 0.8. Using this automated metric, we evaluate more than 1,500 answers from seven LLMs across all WikiContradict instances. To facilitate future work, we release WikiContradict on: https://ibm.biz/wikicontradict.

Large language models (LLMs) are prone to hallucinations in question-answering (QA) tasks when faced with ambiguous questions. Users often assume that LLMs share their cognitive alignment, a mutual understanding of context, intent, and implicit details, leading them to omit critical information in the queries. However, LLMs generate responses based on assumptions that can misalign with user intent, which may be perceived as hallucinations if they misalign with the user's intent. Therefore, identifying those implicit assumptions is crucial to resolve ambiguities in QA. Prior work, such as AmbigQA, reduces ambiguity in queries via human-annotated clarifications, which is not feasible in real application. Meanwhile, ASQA compiles AmbigQA's short answers into long-form responses but inherits human biases and fails capture explicit logical distinctions that differentiates the answers. We introduce Conditional Ambiguous Question-Answering (CondAmbigQA), a benchmark with 200 ambiguous queries and condition-aware evaluation metrics. Our study pioneers the concept of ``conditions'' in ambiguous QA tasks, where conditions stand for contextual constraints or assumptions that resolve ambiguities. The retrieval-based annotation strategy uses retrieved Wikipedia fragments to identify possible interpretations for a given query as its conditions and annotate the answers through those conditions. Such a strategy minimizes human bias introduced by different knowledge levels among annotators. By fixing retrieval results, CondAmbigQA evaluates how RAG systems leverage conditions to resolve ambiguities. Experiments show that models considering conditions before answering improve performance by 20%, with an additional 5% gain when conditions are explicitly provided. These results underscore the value of conditional reasoning in QA, offering researchers tools to rigorously evaluate ambiguity resolution.

This article presents a pipeline for automated fact-checking leveraging publicly available Language Models and data. The objective is to assess the accuracy of textual claims using evidence from a ground-truth evidence corpus. The pipeline consists of two main modules -- the evidence retrieval and the claim veracity evaluation. Our primary focus is on the ease of deployment in various languages that remain unexplored in the field of automated fact-checking. Unlike most similar pipelines, which work with evidence sentences, our pipeline processes data on a paragraph level, simplifying the overall architecture and data requirements. Given the high cost of annotating language-specific fact-checking training data, our solution builds on the Question Answering for Claim Generation (QACG) method, which we adapt and use to generate the data for all models of the pipeline. Our strategy enables the introduction of new languages through machine translation of only two fixed datasets of moderate size. Subsequently, any number of training samples can be generated based on an evidence corpus in the target language. We provide open access to all data and fine-tuned models for Czech, English, Polish, and Slovak pipelines, as well as to our codebase that may be used to reproduce the results.We comprehensively evaluate the pipelines for all four languages, including human annotations and per-sample difficulty assessment using Pointwise V-information. The presented experiments are based on full Wikipedia snapshots to promote reproducibility. To facilitate implementation and user interaction, we develop the FactSearch application featuring the proposed pipeline and the preliminary feedback on its performance.

Large, high-quality annotated corpora remain scarce in document-level entity and relation extraction in zero-shot or few-shot settings. In this paper, we present a fully automatic, LLM-based pipeline for synthetic data generation and in-context learning for document-level entity and relation extraction. In contrast to existing approaches that rely on manually annotated demonstrations or direct zero-shot inference, our method combines synthetic data generation with retrieval-based in-context learning, using a reasoning-optimized language model. This allows us to build a high-quality demonstration database without manual annotation and to dynamically retrieve relevant examples at inference time. Based on our approach we produce a synthetic dataset of over 5k Wikipedia abstracts with approximately 59k entities and 30k relation triples. Finally, we evaluate in-context learning performance on the DocIE shared task, extracting entities and relations from long documents in a zero-shot setting. We find that in-context joint entity and relation extraction at document-level remains a challenging task, even for state-of-the-art large language models.

A prominent achievement of natural language processing (NLP) is its ability to understand and generate meaningful human language. This capability relies on complex feedforward transformer block architectures pre-trained on large language models (LLMs). However, LLM pre-training is currently feasible only for a few dominant companies due to the immense computational resources required, limiting broader research participation. This creates a critical need for more accessible alternatives. In this study, we explore whether tiny language models (TLMs) exhibit the same key qualitative features of LLMs. We demonstrate that TLMs exhibit a clear performance gap between pre-trained and non-pre-trained models across classification tasks, indicating the effectiveness of pre-training, even at a tiny scale. The performance gap increases with the size of the pre-training dataset and with greater overlap between tokens in the pre-training and classification datasets. Furthermore, the classification accuracy achieved by a pre-trained deep TLM architecture can be replicated through a soft committee of multiple, independently pre-trained shallow architectures, enabling low-latency TLMs without affecting classification accuracy. Our results are based on pre-training BERT-6 and variants of BERT-1 on subsets of the Wikipedia dataset and evaluating their performance on FewRel, AGNews, and DBPedia classification tasks. Future research on TLM is expected to further illuminate the mechanisms underlying NLP, especially given that its biologically inspired models suggest that TLMs may be sufficient for children or adolescents to develop language. The data and code that support the findings of this study are openly available on https://github.com/Rg32601/Tiny-Language-Models .

Textual knowledge bases such as Wikipedia require considerable effort to keep up to date and consistent. While automated writing assistants could potentially ease this burden, the problem of suggesting edits grounded in external knowledge has been under-explored. In this paper, we introduce the novel generation task of *faithfully reflecting updated information in text* (FRUIT) where the goal is to update an existing article given new evidence. We release the FRUIT-WIKI dataset, a collection of over 170K distantly supervised data produced from pairs of Wikipedia snapshots, along with our data generation pipeline and a gold evaluation set of 914 instances whose edits are guaranteed to be supported by the evidence. We provide benchmark results for popular generation systems as well as EDIT5 -- a T5-based approach tailored to editing we introduce that establishes the state of the art. Our analysis shows that developing models that can update articles faithfully requires new capabilities for neural generation models, and opens doors to many new applications.

Traditionally, Text Simplification is treated as a monolingual translation task where sentences between source texts and their simplified counterparts are aligned for training. However, especially for longer input documents, summarizing the text (or dropping less relevant content altogether) plays an important role in the simplification process, which is currently not reflected in existing datasets. Simultaneously, resources for non-English languages are scarce in general and prohibitive for training new solutions. To tackle this problem, we pose core requirements for a system that can jointly summarize and simplify long source documents. We further describe the creation of a new dataset for joint Text Simplification and Summarization based on German Wikipedia and the German children's lexicon "Klexikon", consisting of almost 2900 documents. We release a document-aligned version that particularly highlights the summarization aspect, and provide statistical evidence that this resource is well suited to simplification as well. Code and data are available on Github: https://github.com/dennlinger/klexikon

Transformer-based models have advanced NLP, yet Hebrew still lacks a large-scale RoBERTa encoder which is extensively trained. Existing models such as HeBERT, AlephBERT, and HeRo are limited by corpus size, vocabulary, or training depth. We present HalleluBERT, a RoBERTa-based encoder family (base and large) trained from scratch on 49.1~GB of deduplicated Hebrew web text and Wikipedia with a Hebrew-specific byte-level BPE vocabulary. Evaluated on NER and sentiment classification benchmarks, HalleluBERT outperforms both monolingual and multilingual baselines. HalleluBERT sets a new state of the art for Hebrew and highlights the benefits of fully converged monolingual pretraining.

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization abilities in mathematics and logical reasoning tasks. Prior research indicates that LLMs pre-trained with programming language data exhibit high mathematical and reasoning abilities; however, this causal relationship has not been rigorously tested. Our research aims to verify which programming languages and features during pre-training affect logical inference performance. Specifically, we pre-trained decoder-based language models from scratch using datasets from ten programming languages (e.g., Python, C, Java) and three natural language datasets (Wikipedia, Fineweb, C4) under identical conditions. Thereafter, we evaluated the trained models in a few-shot in-context learning setting on logical reasoning tasks: FLD and bAbi, which do not require commonsense or world knowledge. The results demonstrate that nearly all models trained with programming languages consistently outperform those trained with natural languages, indicating that programming languages contain factors that elicit logic inference performance. In addition, we found that models trained with programming languages exhibit a better ability to follow instructions compared to those trained with natural languages. Further analysis reveals that the depth of Abstract Syntax Trees representing parsed results of programs also affects logical reasoning performance. These findings will offer insights into the essential elements of pre-training for acquiring the foundational abilities of LLMs.

Automatically estimating the complexity of texts for readers has a variety of applications, such as recommending texts with an appropriate complexity level to language learners or supporting the evaluation of text simplification approaches. In this paper, we present our submission to the Text Complexity DE Challenge 2022, a regression task where the goal is to predict the complexity of a German sentence for German learners at level B. Our approach relies on more than 220,000 pseudo-labels created from the German Wikipedia and other corpora to train Transformer-based models, and refrains from any feature engineering or any additional, labeled data. We find that the pseudo-label-based approach gives impressive results yet requires little to no adjustment to the specific task and therefore could be easily adapted to other domains and tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) can store a vast amount of world knowledge, often extractable via question-answering (e.g., "What is Abraham Lincoln's birthday?"). However, do they answer such questions based on exposure to similar questions during training (i.e., cheating), or by genuinely learning to extract knowledge from sources like Wikipedia? In this paper, we investigate this issue using a controlled biography dataset. We find a strong correlation between the model's ability to extract knowledge and various diversity measures of the training data. Essentially, for knowledge to be reliably extracted, it must be sufficiently augmented (e.g., through paraphrasing, sentence shuffling) during pretraining. Without such augmentation, knowledge may be memorized but not extractable, leading to 0% accuracy, regardless of subsequent instruction fine-tuning. To understand why this occurs, we employ (nearly) linear probing to demonstrate a strong connection between the observed correlation and how the model internally encodes knowledge -- whether it is linearly encoded in the hidden embeddings of entity names or distributed across other token embeddings in the training text. This paper provides several key recommendations for LLM pretraining in the industry: (1) rewrite the pretraining data -- using small, auxiliary models -- to provide knowledge augmentation, and (2) incorporate more instruction-finetuning data into the pretraining stage before it becomes too late.

The paper studies the linear model for Bitcoin price which includes regression features based on Bitcoin currency statistics, mining processes, Google search trends, Wikipedia pages visits. The pattern of deviation of regression model prediction from real prices is simpler comparing to price time series. It is assumed that this pattern can be predicted by an experienced expert. In such a way, using the combination of the regression model and expert correction, one can receive better results than with either regression model or expert opinion only. It is shown that Bayesian approach makes it possible to utilize the probabilistic approach using distributions with fat tails and take into account the outliers in Bitcoin price time series.

Pre-training data shapes a language model's quality, but raw web text is noisy and demands careful cleaning. Existing large-scale corpora rely on English-centric or language-agnostic pipelines whose heuristics do not capture Thai script or cultural nuances, leaving risky material such as gambling content untreated. Prior Thai-specific efforts customize pipelines or build new ones, yet seldom release their data or document design choices, hindering reproducibility and raising the question of how to construct a transparent, high-quality Thai corpus. We introduce Mangosteen: a 47 billion-token Thai corpus built through a Thai-adapted Dolma pipeline that includes custom rule-based language ID, revised C4/Gopher quality filters, and Thai-trained content filters, plus curated non-web sources such as Wikipedia, Royal Gazette texts, OCR-extracted books, and CC-licensed YouTube subtitles. Systematic ablations using GPT-2 show the pipeline trims CommonCrawl from 202M to 25M documents while raising SEA-HELM NLG from 3 to 11; an 8B-parameter SEA-LION model continually pre-trained on Mangosteen then surpasses SEA-LION-v3 and Llama-3.1 by about four points on Thai benchmarks. We release the full pipeline code, cleaning manifests, corpus snapshot, and all checkpoints, providing a fully reproducible foundation for future Thai and regional LLM research.

In this paper, we champion the use of structured and semantic content representation of discourse-based scholarly communication, inspired by tools like Wikipedia infoboxes or structured Amazon product descriptions. These representations provide users with a concise overview, aiding scientists in navigating the dense academic landscape. Our novel automated approach leverages the robust text generation capabilities of LLMs to produce structured scholarly contribution summaries, offering both a practical solution and insights into LLMs' emergent abilities. For LLMs, the prime focus is on improving their general intelligence as conversational agents. We argue that these models can also be applied effectively in information extraction (IE), specifically in complex IE tasks within terse domains like Science. This paradigm shift replaces the traditional modular, pipelined machine learning approach with a simpler objective expressed through instructions. Our results show that finetuned FLAN-T5 with 1000x fewer parameters than the state-of-the-art GPT-davinci is competitive for the task.

Time is an important dimension in our physical world. Lots of facts can evolve with respect to time. For example, the U.S. President might change every four years. Therefore, it is important to consider the time dimension and empower the existing QA models to reason over time. However, the existing QA datasets contain rather few time-sensitive questions, hence not suitable for diagnosing or benchmarking the model's temporal reasoning capability. In order to promote research in this direction, we propose to construct a time-sensitive QA dataset. The dataset is constructed by 1) mining time-evolving facts from WikiData and aligning them to their corresponding Wikipedia page, 2) employing crowd workers to verify and calibrate these noisy facts, 3) generating question-answer pairs based on the annotated time-sensitive facts. Our dataset poses challenges in the aspect of both temporal understanding and temporal reasoning. We evaluate different SoTA long-document QA systems like BigBird and FiD on our dataset. The best-performing model FiD can only achieve 46\% accuracy, still far behind the human performance of 87\%. We demonstrate that these models are still lacking the ability to perform consistent temporal reasoning. Therefore, we believe that our dataset could serve as a benchmark to develop NLP models more sensitive to temporal shifts. The dataset and code are released in~https://github.com/wenhuchen/Time-Sensitive-QA.

Scaling laws describe the relationship between the size of language models and their capabilities. Unlike prior studies that evaluate a model's capability via loss or benchmarks, we estimate the number of knowledge bits a model stores. We focus on factual knowledge represented as tuples, such as (USA, capital, Washington D.C.) from a Wikipedia page. Through multiple controlled datasets, we establish that language models can and only can store 2 bits of knowledge per parameter, even when quantized to int8, and such knowledge can be flexibly extracted for downstream applications. Consequently, a 7B model can store 14B bits of knowledge, surpassing the English Wikipedia and textbooks combined based on our estimation. More broadly, we present 12 results on how (1) training duration, (2) model architecture, (3) quantization, (4) sparsity constraints such as MoE, and (5) data signal-to-noise ratio affect a model's knowledge storage capacity. Notable insights include: * The GPT-2 architecture, with rotary embedding, matches or even surpasses LLaMA/Mistral architectures in knowledge storage, particularly over shorter training durations. This arises because LLaMA/Mistral uses GatedMLP, which is less stable and harder to train. * Prepending training data with domain names (e.g., wikipedia.org) significantly increases a model's knowledge capacity. Language models can autonomously identify and prioritize domains rich in knowledge, optimizing their storage capacity.

The Internet facilitates large-scale collaborative projects and the emergence of Web 2.0 platforms, where producers and consumers of content unify, has drastically changed the information market. On the one hand, the promise of the "wisdom of the crowd" has inspired successful projects such as Wikipedia, which has become the primary source of crowd-based information in many languages. On the other hand, the decentralized and often un-monitored environment of such projects may make them susceptible to low quality content. In this work, we focus on Urban Dictionary, a crowd-sourced online dictionary. We combine computational methods with qualitative annotation and shed light on the overall features of Urban Dictionary in terms of growth, coverage and types of content. We measure a high presence of opinion-focused entries, as opposed to the meaning-focused entries that we expect from traditional dictionaries. Furthermore, Urban Dictionary covers many informal, unfamiliar words as well as proper nouns. Urban Dictionary also contains offensive content, but highly offensive content tends to receive lower scores through the dictionary's voting system. The low threshold to include new material in Urban Dictionary enables quick recording of new words and new meanings, but the resulting heterogeneous content can pose challenges in using Urban Dictionary as a source to study language innovation.

Generation with source attribution is important for enhancing the verifiability of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. However, existing approaches in RAG primarily link generated content to document-level references, making it challenging for users to locate evidence among multiple content-rich retrieved documents. To address this challenge, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Visual Source Attribution (VISA), a novel approach that combines answer generation with visual source attribution. Leveraging large vision-language models (VLMs), VISA identifies the evidence and highlights the exact regions that support the generated answers with bounding boxes in the retrieved document screenshots. To evaluate its effectiveness, we curated two datasets: Wiki-VISA, based on crawled Wikipedia webpage screenshots, and Paper-VISA, derived from PubLayNet and tailored to the medical domain. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of VISA for visual source attribution on documents' original look, as well as highlighting the challenges for improvement. Code, data, and model checkpoints will be released.

While textual information significantly enhances the performance of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in knowledge graph completion (KGC), the static and noisy nature of existing corpora collected from Wikipedia articles or synsets definitions often limits the potential of PLM-based KGC models. To surmount these challenges, we introduce the Contextualization Distillation strategy, a versatile plug-in-and-play approach compatible with both discriminative and generative KGC frameworks. Our method begins by instructing large language models (LLMs) to transform compact, structural triplets into context-rich segments. Subsequently, we introduce two tailored auxiliary tasks, reconstruction and contextualization, allowing smaller KGC models to assimilate insights from these enriched triplets. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse datasets and KGC techniques highlight the efficacy and adaptability of our approach, revealing consistent performance enhancements irrespective of underlying pipelines or architectures. Moreover, our analysis makes our method more explainable and provides insight into generating path selection, as well as the choosing of suitable distillation tasks. All the code and data in this work will be released at https://github.com/David-Li0406/Contextulization-Distillation

This paper studies ensembling in the era of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). Ensembling is a classical method to combine different models to get increased performance. In the recent work on Encyclopedic-VQA the authors examine a wide variety of models to solve their task: from vanilla LVLMs, to models including the caption as extra context, to models augmented with Lens-based retrieval of Wikipedia pages. Intuitively these models are highly complementary, which should make them ideal for ensembling. Indeed, an oracle experiment shows potential gains from 48.8% accuracy (the best single model) all the way up to 67% (best possible ensemble). So it is a trivial exercise to create an ensemble with substantial real gains. Or is it?

A number of datasets for Relation Extraction (RE) have been created to aide downstream tasks such as information retrieval, semantic search, question answering and textual entailment. However, these datasets fail to capture financial-domain specific challenges since most of these datasets are compiled using general knowledge sources such as Wikipedia, web-based text and news articles, hindering real-life progress and adoption within the financial world. To address this limitation, we propose REFinD, the first large-scale annotated dataset of relations, with sim29K instances and 22 relations amongst 8 types of entity pairs, generated entirely over financial documents. We also provide an empirical evaluation with various state-of-the-art models as benchmarks for the RE task and highlight the challenges posed by our dataset. We observed that various state-of-the-art deep learning models struggle with numeric inference, relational and directional ambiguity.

The primary objective of our work is to build a large-scale English-Thai dataset for machine translation. We construct an English-Thai machine translation dataset with over 1 million segment pairs, curated from various sources, namely news, Wikipedia articles, SMS messages, task-based dialogs, web-crawled data and government documents. Methodology for gathering data, building parallel texts and removing noisy sentence pairs are presented in a reproducible manner. We train machine translation models based on this dataset. Our models' performance are comparable to that of Google Translation API (as of May 2020) for Thai-English and outperform Google when the Open Parallel Corpus (OPUS) is included in the training data for both Thai-English and English-Thai translation. The dataset, pre-trained models, and source code to reproduce our work are available for public use.

We demonstrate an end-to-end question answering system that integrates BERT with the open-source Anserini information retrieval toolkit. In contrast to most question answering and reading comprehension models today, which operate over small amounts of input text, our system integrates best practices from IR with a BERT-based reader to identify answers from a large corpus of Wikipedia articles in an end-to-end fashion. We report large improvements over previous results on a standard benchmark test collection, showing that fine-tuning pretrained BERT with SQuAD is sufficient to achieve high accuracy in identifying answer spans.

Multilingual language models have been a crucial breakthrough as they considerably reduce the need of data for under-resourced languages. Nevertheless, the superiority of language-specific models has already been proven for languages having access to large amounts of data. In this work, we focus on Catalan with the aim to explore to what extent a medium-sized monolingual language model is competitive with state-of-the-art large multilingual models. For this, we: (1) build a clean, high-quality textual Catalan corpus (CaText), the largest to date (but only a fraction of the usual size of the previous work in monolingual language models), (2) train a Transformer-based language model for Catalan (BERTa), and (3) devise a thorough evaluation in a diversity of settings, comprising a complete array of downstream tasks, namely, Part of Speech Tagging, Named Entity Recognition and Classification, Text Classification, Question Answering, and Semantic Textual Similarity, with most of the corresponding datasets being created ex novo. The result is a new benchmark, the Catalan Language Understanding Benchmark (CLUB), which we publish as an open resource, together with the clean textual corpus, the language model, and the cleaning pipeline. Using state-of-the-art multilingual models and a monolingual model trained only on Wikipedia as baselines, we consistently observe the superiority of our model across tasks and settings.

Wikimedia content is used extensively by the AI community and within the language modeling community in particular. In this paper, we provide a review of the different ways in which Wikimedia data is curated to use in NLP tasks across pre-training, post-training, and model evaluations. We point to opportunities for greater use of Wikimedia content but also identify ways in which the language modeling community could better center the needs of Wikimedia editors. In particular, we call for incorporating additional sources of Wikimedia data, a greater focus on benchmarks for LLMs that encode Wikimedia principles, and greater multilingualism in Wikimedia-derived datasets.

This paper introduces an approach to question answering over knowledge bases like Wikipedia and Wikidata by performing "question-to-question" matching and retrieval from a dense vector embedding store. Instead of embedding document content, we generate a comprehensive set of questions for each logical content unit using an instruction-tuned LLM. These questions are vector-embedded and stored, mapping to the corresponding content. Vector embedding of user queries are then matched against this question vector store. The highest similarity score leads to direct retrieval of the associated article content, eliminating the need for answer generation. Our method achieves high cosine similarity ( > 0.9 ) for relevant question pairs, enabling highly precise retrieval. This approach offers several advantages including computational efficiency, rapid response times, and increased scalability. We demonstrate its effectiveness on Wikipedia and Wikidata, including multimedia content through structured fact retrieval from Wikidata, opening up new pathways for multimodal question answering.

Web-scale visual entity recognition, the task of associating images with their corresponding entities within vast knowledge bases like Wikipedia, presents significant challenges due to the lack of clean, large-scale training data. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to curate such a dataset, leveraging a multimodal large language model (LLM) for label verification, metadata generation, and rationale explanation. Instead of relying on the multimodal LLM to directly annotate data, which we found to be suboptimal, we prompt it to reason about potential candidate entity labels by accessing additional contextually relevant information (such as Wikipedia), resulting in more accurate annotations. We further use the multimodal LLM to enrich the dataset by generating question-answer pairs and a grounded finegrained textual description (referred to as "rationale") that explains the connection between images and their assigned entities. Experiments demonstrate that models trained on this automatically curated data achieve state-of-the-art performance on web-scale visual entity recognition tasks (e.g. +6.9% improvement in OVEN entity task), underscoring the importance of high-quality training data in this domain.

Open information extraction (OIE) systems extract relations and their arguments from natural language text in an unsupervised manner. The resulting extractions are a valuable resource for downstream tasks such as knowledge base construction, open question answering, or event schema induction. In this paper, we release, describe, and analyze an OIE corpus called OPIEC, which was extracted from the text of English Wikipedia. OPIEC complements the available OIE resources: It is the largest OIE corpus publicly available to date (over 340M triples) and contains valuable metadata such as provenance information, confidence scores, linguistic annotations, and semantic annotations including spatial and temporal information. We analyze the OPIEC corpus by comparing its content with knowledge bases such as DBpedia or YAGO, which are also based on Wikipedia. We found that most of the facts between entities present in OPIEC cannot be found in DBpedia and/or YAGO, that OIE facts often differ in the level of specificity compared to knowledge base facts, and that OIE open relations are generally highly polysemous. We believe that the OPIEC corpus is a valuable resource for future research on automated knowledge base construction.

We study how to apply large language models to write grounded and organized long-form articles from scratch, with comparable breadth and depth to Wikipedia pages. This underexplored problem poses new challenges at the pre-writing stage, including how to research the topic and prepare an outline prior to writing. We propose STORM, a writing system for the Synthesis of Topic Outlines through Retrieval and Multi-perspective Question Asking. STORM models the pre-writing stage by (1) discovering diverse perspectives in researching the given topic, (2) simulating conversations where writers carrying different perspectives pose questions to a topic expert grounded on trusted Internet sources, (3) curating the collected information to create an outline. For evaluation, we curate FreshWiki, a dataset of recent high-quality Wikipedia articles, and formulate outline assessments to evaluate the pre-writing stage. We further gather feedback from experienced Wikipedia editors. Compared to articles generated by an outline-driven retrieval-augmented baseline, more of STORM's articles are deemed to be organized (by a 25% absolute increase) and broad in coverage (by 10%). The expert feedback also helps identify new challenges for generating grounded long articles, such as source bias transfer and over-association of unrelated facts.

Welsh is an official language in Wales and is spoken by an estimated 884,300 people (29.2% of the population of Wales). Despite this status and estimated increase in speaker numbers since the last (2011) census, Welsh remains a minority language undergoing revitalization and promotion by Welsh Government and relevant stakeholders. As part of the effort to increase the availability of Welsh digital technology, this paper introduces the first Welsh summarisation dataset, which we provide freely for research purposes to help advance the work on Welsh text summarization. The dataset was created by Welsh speakers by manually summarising Welsh Wikipedia articles. In addition, the paper discusses the implementation and evaluation of different summarisation systems for Welsh. The summarization systems and results will serve as benchmarks for the development of summarises in other minority language contexts.

This work addresses two important questions pertinent to Relation Extraction (RE). First, what are all possible relations that could exist between any two given entity types? Second, how do we define an unambiguous taxonomical (is-a) hierarchy among the identified relations? To address the first question, we use three resources Wikipedia Infobox, Wikidata, and DBpedia. This study focuses on relations between person, organization and location entity types. We exploit Wikidata and DBpedia in a data-driven manner, and Wikipedia Infobox templates manually to generate lists of relations. Further, to address the second question, we canonicalize, filter, and combine the identified relations from the three resources to construct a taxonomical hierarchy. This hierarchy contains 623 canonical relations with highest contribution from Wikipedia Infobox followed by DBpedia and Wikidata. The generated relation list subsumes an average of 85% of relations from RE datasets when entity types are restricted.

Text representations using neural word embeddings have proven effective in many NLP applications. Recent researches adapt the traditional word embedding models to learn vectors of multiword expressions (concepts/entities). However, these methods are limited to textual knowledge bases (e.g., Wikipedia). In this paper, we propose a novel and simple technique for integrating the knowledge about concepts from two large scale knowledge bases of different structure (Wikipedia and Probase) in order to learn concept representations. We adapt the efficient skip-gram model to seamlessly learn from the knowledge in Wikipedia text and Probase concept graph. We evaluate our concept embedding models on two tasks: (1) analogical reasoning, where we achieve a state-of-the-art performance of 91% on semantic analogies, (2) concept categorization, where we achieve a state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets achieving categorization accuracy of 100% on one and 98% on the other. Additionally, we present a case study to evaluate our model on unsupervised argument type identification for neural semantic parsing. We demonstrate the competitive accuracy of our unsupervised method and its ability to better generalize to out of vocabulary entity mentions compared to the tedious and error prone methods which depend on gazetteers and regular expressions.

We present a new knowledge-base of hasPart relationships, extracted from a large corpus of generic statements. Complementary to other resources available, it is the first which is all three of: accurate (90% precision), salient (covers relationships a person may mention), and has high coverage of common terms (approximated as within a 10 year old's vocabulary), as well as having several times more hasPart entries than in the popular ontologies ConceptNet and WordNet. In addition, it contains information about quantifiers, argument modifiers, and links the entities to appropriate concepts in Wikipedia and WordNet. The knowledge base is available at https://allenai.org/data/haspartkb

Scaling data quantity is essential for large language models (LLMs), yet recent findings show that data quality can significantly boost performance and training efficiency. We introduce a German-language dataset curation pipeline that combines heuristic and model-based filtering techniques with synthetic data generation. We use our pipeline to create Aleph-Alpha-GermanWeb, a large-scale German pre-training dataset which draws from: (1) Common Crawl web data, (2) FineWeb2, and (3) synthetically-generated data conditioned on actual, organic web data. We evaluate our dataset by pre-training both a 1B Llama-style model and an 8B tokenizer-free hierarchical autoregressive transformer (HAT). A comparison on German-language benchmarks, including MMMLU, shows significant performance gains of Aleph-Alpha-GermanWeb over FineWeb2 alone. This advantage holds at the 8B scale even when FineWeb2 is enriched by human-curated high-quality data sources such as Wikipedia. Our findings support the growing body of evidence that model-based data curation and synthetic data generation can significantly enhance LLM pre-training datasets.

Dense retrieval needs to learn discriminative text embeddings to represent the semantic relationship between query and document. It may benefit from the using of large language models (LLMs), given LLMs' strong capability on semantic understanding. However, the LLMs are pre-trained by text generation tasks, whose working pattern is completely different from representing texts as embeddings. As a result, it is imperative to study how to adapt LLMs properly so that they can be effectively initialized as the backbone encoder for dense retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called LLaRA (LLM adapted for dense RetrievAl), which works as a post-hoc adaptation of LLM for the dense retrieval application. LLaRA consists of two pretext tasks: EBAE (Embedding-Based Auto-Encoding) and EBAR (Embedding-Based Auto-Regression), where the text embeddings from LLM are used to reconstruct the tokens for the input sentence and predict the tokens for the next sentence, respectively. LLaRA turns out to be simple, lightweight, and highly effective. It is applied to adapt LLaMA-2-7B (base) on the Wikipedia corpus, where it substantially improves the model's fine-tuned performances on a variety of dense retrieval benchmarks, like MSMARCO and BEIR. Our model and code will be made publicly available at BGE repository.

Open-domain question answering (QA) is the tasl of identifying answers to natural questions from a large corpus of documents. The typical open-domain QA system starts with information retrieval to select a subset of documents from the corpus, which are then processed by a machine reader to select the answer spans. This paper describes Mindstone, an open-domain QA system that consists of a new multi-stage pipeline that employs a traditional BM25-based information retriever, RM3-based neural relevance feedback, neural ranker, and a machine reading comprehension stage. This paper establishes a new baseline for end-to-end performance on question answering for Wikipedia/SQuAD dataset (EM=58.1, F1=65.8), with substantial gains over the previous state of the art (Yang et al., 2019b). We also show how the new pipeline enables the use of low-resolution labels, and can be easily tuned to meet various timing requirements.

Monitoring the threat landscape to be aware of actual or potential attacks is of utmost importance to cybersecurity professionals. Information about cyber threats is typically distributed using natural language reports. Natural language processing can help with managing this large amount of unstructured information, yet to date, the topic has received little attention. With this paper, we present AnnoCTR, a new CC-BY-SA-licensed dataset of cyber threat reports. The reports have been annotated by a domain expert with named entities, temporal expressions, and cybersecurity-specific concepts including implicitly mentioned techniques and tactics. Entities and concepts are linked to Wikipedia and the MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base, the most widely-used taxonomy for classifying types of attacks. Prior datasets linking to MITRE ATT&CK either provide a single label per document or annotate sentences out-of-context; our dataset annotates entire documents in a much finer-grained way. In an experimental study, we model the annotations of our dataset using state-of-the-art neural models. In our few-shot scenario, we find that for identifying the MITRE ATT&CK concepts that are mentioned explicitly or implicitly in a text, concept descriptions from MITRE ATT&CK are an effective source for training data augmentation.

We introduce scientific claim verification, a new task to select abstracts from the research literature containing evidence that SUPPORTS or REFUTES a given scientific claim, and to identify rationales justifying each decision. To study this task, we construct SciFact, a dataset of 1.4K expert-written scientific claims paired with evidence-containing abstracts annotated with labels and rationales. We develop baseline models for SciFact, and demonstrate that simple domain adaptation techniques substantially improve performance compared to models trained on Wikipedia or political news. We show that our system is able to verify claims related to COVID-19 by identifying evidence from the CORD-19 corpus. Our experiments indicate that SciFact will provide a challenging testbed for the development of new systems designed to retrieve and reason over corpora containing specialized domain knowledge. Data and code for this new task are publicly available at https://github.com/allenai/scifact. A leaderboard and COVID-19 fact-checking demo are available at https://scifact.apps.allenai.org.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed listwise document reranking by enabling global reasoning over candidate sets, yet single models often struggle to balance fine-grained relevance scoring with holistic cross-document analysis. We propose DeepAgentRank (\DeAR), an open-source framework that decouples these tasks through a dual-stage approach, achieving superior accuracy and interpretability. In Stage 1, we distill token-level relevance signals from a frozen 13B LLaMA teacher into a compact \{3, 8\}B student model using a hybrid of cross-entropy, RankNet, and KL divergence losses, ensuring robust pointwise scoring. In Stage 2, we attach a second LoRA adapter and fine-tune on 20K GPT-4o-generated chain-of-thought permutations, enabling listwise reasoning with natural-language justifications. Evaluated on TREC-DL19/20, eight BEIR datasets, and NovelEval-2306, \DeAR surpasses open-source baselines by +5.1 nDCG@5 on DL20 and achieves 90.97 nDCG@10 on NovelEval, outperforming GPT-4 by +3.09. Without fine-tuning on Wikipedia, DeAR also excels in open-domain QA, achieving 54.29 Top-1 accuracy on Natural Questions, surpassing baselines like MonoT5, UPR, and RankGPT. Ablations confirm that dual-loss distillation ensures stable calibration, making \DeAR a highly effective and interpretable solution for modern reranking systems.Dataset and code available at https://github.com/DataScienceUIBK/DeAR-Reranking..

Large language models have emerged as effective machine translation systems. In this paper, we explore how a general instruction-tuned large language model can be improved for machine translation using relatively few easily produced data resources. Using Slovene as a use case, we improve the GaMS-9B-Instruct model using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) training on a programmatically curated and enhanced subset of a public dataset. As DPO requires pairs of quality-ranked instances, we generated its training dataset by translating English Wikipedia articles using two LLMs, GaMS-9B-Instruct and EuroLLM-9B-Instruct. We ranked the resulting translations based on heuristics coupled with automatic evaluation metrics such as COMET. The evaluation shows that our fine-tuned model outperforms both models involved in the dataset generation. In comparison to the baseline models, the fine-tuned model achieved a COMET score gain of around 0.04 and 0.02, respectively, on translating Wikipedia articles. It also more consistently avoids language and formatting errors.

Selecting a suitable training dataset is crucial for both general-domain (e.g., GPT-3) and domain-specific (e.g., Codex) language models (LMs). We formalize this data selection problem as selecting a subset of a large raw unlabeled dataset to match a desired target distribution, given some unlabeled target samples. Due to the large scale and dimensionality of the raw text data, existing methods use simple heuristics to select data that are similar to a high-quality reference corpus (e.g., Wikipedia), or leverage experts to manually curate data. Instead, we extend the classic importance resampling approach used in low-dimensions for LM data selection. Crucially, we work in a reduced feature space to make importance weight estimation tractable over the space of text. To determine an appropriate feature space, we first show that KL reduction, a data metric that measures the proximity between selected data and the target in a feature space, has high correlation with average accuracy on 8 downstream tasks (r=0.89) when computed with simple n-gram features. From this observation, we present Data Selection with Importance Resampling (DSIR), an efficient and scalable algorithm that estimates importance weights in a reduced feature space (e.g., n-gram features in our instantiation) and selects data with importance resampling according to these weights. When training general-domain models (target is Wikipedia + books), DSIR improves over random selection and heuristic filtering baselines by 2--2.5% on the GLUE benchmark. When performing continued pretraining towards a specific domain, DSIR performs comparably to expert curated data across 8 target distributions.

We introduce ReFinED, an efficient end-to-end entity linking model which uses fine-grained entity types and entity descriptions to perform linking. The model performs mention detection, fine-grained entity typing, and entity disambiguation for all mentions within a document in a single forward pass, making it more than 60 times faster than competitive existing approaches. ReFinED also surpasses state-of-the-art performance on standard entity linking datasets by an average of 3.7 F1. The model is capable of generalising to large-scale knowledge bases such as Wikidata (which has 15 times more entities than Wikipedia) and of zero-shot entity linking. The combination of speed, accuracy and scale makes ReFinED an effective and cost-efficient system for extracting entities from web-scale datasets, for which the model has been successfully deployed. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/alexa/ReFinED

Over 97 million people speak Vietnamese as their native language in the world. However, there are few research studies on machine reading comprehension (MRC) for Vietnamese, the task of understanding a text and answering questions related to it. Due to the lack of benchmark datasets for Vietnamese, we present the Vietnamese Question Answering Dataset (UIT-ViQuAD), a new dataset for the low-resource language as Vietnamese to evaluate MRC models. This dataset comprises over 23,000 human-generated question-answer pairs based on 5,109 passages of 174 Vietnamese articles from Wikipedia. In particular, we propose a new process of dataset creation for Vietnamese MRC. Our in-depth analyses illustrate that our dataset requires abilities beyond simple reasoning like word matching and demands single-sentence and multiple-sentence inferences. Besides, we conduct experiments on state-of-the-art MRC methods for English and Chinese as the first experimental models on UIT-ViQuAD. We also estimate human performance on the dataset and compare it to the experimental results of powerful machine learning models. As a result, the substantial differences between human performance and the best model performance on the dataset indicate that improvements can be made on UIT-ViQuAD in future research. Our dataset is freely available on our website to encourage the research community to overcome challenges in Vietnamese MRC.

We propose Encyclopedic-VQA, a large scale visual question answering (VQA) dataset featuring visual questions about detailed properties of fine-grained categories and instances. It contains 221k unique question+answer pairs each matched with (up to) 5 images, resulting in a total of 1M VQA samples. Moreover, our dataset comes with a controlled knowledge base derived from Wikipedia, marking the evidence to support each answer. Empirically, we show that our dataset poses a hard challenge for large vision+language models as they perform poorly on our dataset: PaLI [14] is state-of-the-art on OK-VQA [37], yet it only achieves 13.0% accuracy on our dataset. Moreover, we experimentally show that progress on answering our encyclopedic questions can be achieved by augmenting large models with a mechanism that retrieves relevant information from the knowledge base. An oracle experiment with perfect retrieval achieves 87.0% accuracy on the single-hop portion of our dataset, and an automatic retrieval-augmented prototype yields 48.8%. We believe that our dataset enables future research on retrieval-augmented vision+language models. It is available at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/encyclopedic_vqa .

Texts like news, encyclopedias, and some social media strive for objectivity. Yet bias in the form of inappropriate subjectivity - introducing attitudes via framing, presupposing truth, and casting doubt - remains ubiquitous. This kind of bias erodes our collective trust and fuels social conflict. To address this issue, we introduce a novel testbed for natural language generation: automatically bringing inappropriately subjective text into a neutral point of view ("neutralizing" biased text). We also offer the first parallel corpus of biased language. The corpus contains 180,000 sentence pairs and originates from Wikipedia edits that removed various framings, presuppositions, and attitudes from biased sentences. Last, we propose two strong encoder-decoder baselines for the task. A straightforward yet opaque CONCURRENT system uses a BERT encoder to identify subjective words as part of the generation process. An interpretable and controllable MODULAR algorithm separates these steps, using (1) a BERT-based classifier to identify problematic words and (2) a novel join embedding through which the classifier can edit the hidden states of the encoder. Large-scale human evaluation across four domains (encyclopedias, news headlines, books, and political speeches) suggests that these algorithms are a first step towards the automatic identification and reduction of bias.

The capability to generate responses with diversity and faithfulness using factual knowledge is paramount for creating a human-like, trustworthy dialogue system. Common strategies either adopt a two-step paradigm, which optimizes knowledge selection and response generation separately, and may overlook the inherent correlation between these two tasks, or leverage conditional variational method to jointly optimize knowledge selection and response generation by employing an inference network. In this paper, we present an end-to-end learning framework, termed Sequential Posterior Inference (SPI), capable of selecting knowledge and generating dialogues by approximately sampling from the posterior distribution. Unlike other methods, SPI does not require the inference network or assume a simple geometry of the posterior distribution. This straightforward and intuitive inference procedure of SPI directly queries the response generation model, allowing for accurate knowledge selection and generation of faithful responses. In addition to modeling contributions, our experimental results on two common dialogue datasets (Wizard of Wikipedia and Holl-E) demonstrate that SPI outperforms previous strong baselines according to both automatic and human evaluation metrics.

Question Answering (QA) is a task in which a machine understands a given document and a question to find an answer. Despite impressive progress in the NLP area, QA is still a challenging problem, especially for non-English languages due to the lack of annotated datasets. In this paper, we present the Japanese Question Answering Dataset, JaQuAD, which is annotated by humans. JaQuAD consists of 39,696 extractive question-answer pairs on Japanese Wikipedia articles. We finetuned a baseline model which achieves 78.92% for F1 score and 63.38% for EM on test set. The dataset and our experiments are available at https://github.com/SkelterLabsInc/JaQuAD.

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across tasks in language understanding and interactive decision making, their abilities for reasoning (e.g. chain-of-thought prompting) and acting (e.g. action plan generation) have primarily been studied as separate topics. In this paper, we explore the use of LLMs to generate both reasoning traces and task-specific actions in an interleaved manner, allowing for greater synergy between the two: reasoning traces help the model induce, track, and update action plans as well as handle exceptions, while actions allow it to interface with external sources, such as knowledge bases or environments, to gather additional information. We apply our approach, named ReAct, to a diverse set of language and decision making tasks and demonstrate its effectiveness over state-of-the-art baselines, as well as improved human interpretability and trustworthiness over methods without reasoning or acting components. Concretely, on question answering (HotpotQA) and fact verification (Fever), ReAct overcomes issues of hallucination and error propagation prevalent in chain-of-thought reasoning by interacting with a simple Wikipedia API, and generates human-like task-solving trajectories that are more interpretable than baselines without reasoning traces. On two interactive decision making benchmarks (ALFWorld and WebShop), ReAct outperforms imitation and reinforcement learning methods by an absolute success rate of 34% and 10% respectively, while being prompted with only one or two in-context examples. Project site with code: https://react-lm.github.io

Transformer models have revolutionized NLP, yet many morphologically rich languages remain underrepresented in large-scale pre-training efforts. With SindBERT, we set out to chart the seas of Turkish NLP, providing the first large-scale RoBERTa-based encoder for Turkish. Trained from scratch on 312 GB of Turkish text (mC4, OSCAR23, Wikipedia), SindBERT is released in both base and large configurations, representing the first large-scale encoder-only language model available for Turkish. We evaluate SindBERT on part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, offensive language detection, and the TurBLiMP linguistic acceptability benchmark. Our results show that SindBERT performs competitively with existing Turkish and multilingual models, with the large variant achieving the best scores in two of four tasks but showing no consistent scaling advantage overall. This flat scaling trend, also observed for XLM-R and EuroBERT, suggests that current Turkish benchmarks may already be saturated. At the same time, comparisons with smaller but more curated models such as BERTurk highlight that corpus quality and diversity can outweigh sheer data volume. Taken together, SindBERT contributes both as an openly released resource for Turkish NLP and as an empirical case study on the limits of scaling and the central role of corpus composition in morphologically rich languages. The SindBERT models are released under the MIT license and made available in both fairseq and Huggingface formats.

Traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) benchmarks rely on different heuristic-based metrics for evaluation, but these require human preferences as ground truth for reference. In contrast, arena-based benchmarks, where two models compete each other, require an expensive Large Language Model (LLM) as a judge for a reliable evaluation. We present an easy and efficient technique to get the best of both worlds. The idea is to train a learning to rank model as a "surrogate" judge using RAG-based evaluation heuristics as input, to produce a synthetic arena-based leaderboard. Using this idea, We develop MIRAGE-Bench, a standardized arena-based multilingual RAG benchmark for 18 diverse languages on Wikipedia. The benchmark is constructed using MIRACL, a retrieval dataset, and extended for multilingual generation evaluation. MIRAGE-Bench evaluates RAG extensively coupling both heuristic features and LLM as a judge evaluator. In our work, we benchmark 19 diverse multilingual-focused LLMs, and achieve a high correlation (Kendall Tau (tau) = 0.909) using our surrogate judge learned using heuristic features with pairwise evaluations and between GPT-4o as a teacher on the MIRAGE-Bench leaderboard using the Bradley-Terry framework. We observe proprietary and large open-source LLMs currently dominate in multilingual RAG. MIRAGE-Bench is available at: https://github.com/vectara/mirage-bench.

One type of question that is commonly found in day-to-day scenarios is ``fan-out'' questions, complex multi-hop, multi-document reasoning questions that require finding information about a large number of entities. However, there exist few resources to evaluate this type of question-answering capability among large language models. To evaluate complex reasoning in LLMs more fully, we present FanOutQA, a high-quality dataset of fan-out question-answer pairs and human-annotated decompositions with English Wikipedia as the knowledge base. We formulate three benchmark settings across our dataset and benchmark 7 LLMs, including GPT-4, LLaMA 2, Claude-2.1, and Mixtral-8x7B, finding that contemporary models still have room to improve reasoning over inter-document dependencies in a long context. We provide our dataset and open-source tools to run models to encourage evaluation at https://fanoutqa.com

Understanding the origins of militarized conflict is a complex, yet important undertaking. Existing research seeks to build this understanding by considering bi-lateral relationships between entity pairs (dyadic causes) and multi-lateral relationships among multiple entities (systemic causes). The aim of this work is to compare these two causes in terms of how they correlate with conflict between two entities. We do this by devising a set of textual and graph-based features which represent each of the causes. The features are extracted from Wikipedia and modeled as a large graph. Nodes in this graph represent entities connected by labeled edges representing ally or enemy-relationships. This allows casting the problem as an edge classification task, which we term dyad classification. We propose and evaluate classifiers to determine if a particular pair of entities are allies or enemies. Our results suggest that our systemic features might be slightly better correlates of conflict. Further, we find that Wikipedia articles of allies are semantically more similar than enemies.

We evaluated the effectiveness of using language models, that were pre-trained in one domain, as the basis for a classification model in another domain: Dutch book reviews. Pre-trained language models have opened up new possibilities for classification tasks with limited labelled data, because representation can be learned in an unsupervised fashion. In our experiments we have studied the effects of training set size (100-1600 items) on the prediction accuracy of a ULMFiT classifier, based on a language models that we pre-trained on the Dutch Wikipedia. We also compared ULMFiT to Support Vector Machines, which is traditionally considered suitable for small collections. We found that ULMFiT outperforms SVM for all training set sizes and that satisfactory results (~90%) can be achieved using training sets that can be manually annotated within a few hours. We deliver both our new benchmark collection of Dutch book reviews for sentiment classification as well as the pre-trained Dutch language model to the community.

For machine translation, a vast majority of language pairs in the world are considered low-resource because they have little parallel data available. Besides the technical challenges of learning with limited supervision, it is difficult to evaluate methods trained on low-resource language pairs because of the lack of freely and publicly available benchmarks. In this work, we introduce the FLoRes evaluation datasets for Nepali-English and Sinhala-English, based on sentences translated from Wikipedia. Compared to English, these are languages with very different morphology and syntax, for which little out-of-domain parallel data is available and for which relatively large amounts of monolingual data are freely available. We describe our process to collect and cross-check the quality of translations, and we report baseline performance using several learning settings: fully supervised, weakly supervised, semi-supervised, and fully unsupervised. Our experiments demonstrate that current state-of-the-art methods perform rather poorly on this benchmark, posing a challenge to the research community working on low-resource MT. Data and code to reproduce our experiments are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/flores.

Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) refers to the task of resolving multiple named entity mentions in a document to their correct references in a knowledge base (KB) (e.g., Wikipedia). In this paper, we propose a novel embedding method specifically designed for NED. The proposed method jointly maps words and entities into the same continuous vector space. We extend the skip-gram model by using two models. The KB graph model learns the relatedness of entities using the link structure of the KB, whereas the anchor context model aims to align vectors such that similar words and entities occur close to one another in the vector space by leveraging KB anchors and their context words. By combining contexts based on the proposed embedding with standard NED features, we achieved state-of-the-art accuracy of 93.1% on the standard CoNLL dataset and 85.2% on the TAC 2010 dataset.