Decompose, Enrich, and Extract! Schema-aware Event Extraction using LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate significant capabilities in processing natural language data, promising efficient knowledge extraction from diverse textual sources to enhance situational awareness and support decision-making. However, concerns arise due to their susceptibility to hallucination, resulting in contextually inaccurate content. This work focuses on harnessing LLMs for automated Event Extraction, introducing a new method to address hallucination by decomposing the task into Event Detection and Event Argument Extraction. Moreover, the proposed method integrates dynamic schema-aware augmented retrieval examples into prompts tailored for each specific inquiry, thereby extending and adapting advanced prompting techniques such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Evaluation findings on prominent event extraction benchmarks and results from a synthesized benchmark illustrate the method's superior performance compared to baseline approaches.

Direct Evaluation of Chain-of-Thought in Multi-hop Reasoning with Knowledge Graphs

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning abilities when prompted to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations alongside answers. However, previous research on evaluating LLMs has solely focused on answer accuracy, neglecting the correctness of the generated CoT. In this paper, we delve deeper into the CoT reasoning capabilities of LLMs in multi-hop question answering by utilizing knowledge graphs (KGs). We propose a novel discriminative and generative CoT evaluation paradigm to assess LLMs' knowledge of reasoning and the accuracy of the generated CoT. Through experiments conducted on 5 different families of LLMs across 2 multi-hop question-answering datasets, we find that LLMs possess sufficient knowledge to perform reasoning. However, there exists a significant disparity between answer accuracy and faithfulness of the CoT reasoning generated by LLMs, indicating that they often arrive at correct answers through incorrect reasoning.

Simultaneous Machine Translation with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLM) have demonstrated their abilities to solve various natural language processing tasks through dialogue-based interactions. For instance, research indicates that LLMs can achieve competitive performance in offline machine translation tasks for high-resource languages. However, applying LLMs to simultaneous machine translation (SimulMT) poses many challenges, including issues related to the training-inference mismatch arising from different decoding patterns. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of utilizing LLMs for SimulMT. Building upon conventional approaches, we introduce a simple yet effective mixture policy that enables LLMs to engage in SimulMT without requiring additional training. Furthermore, after Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on a mixture of full and prefix sentences, the model exhibits significant performance improvements. Our experiments, conducted with Llama2-7B-chat on nine language pairs from the MUST-C dataset, demonstrate that LLM can achieve translation quality and latency comparable to dedicated SimulMT models.

Language Independent Neuro-Symbolic Semantic Parsing for Form Understanding

Recent works on form understanding mostly employ multimodal transformers or large-scale pre-trained language models. These models need ample data for pre-training. In contrast, humans can usually identify key-value pairings from a form only by looking at layouts, even if they don't comprehend the language used. No prior research has been conducted to investigate how helpful layout information alone is for form understanding. Hence, we propose a unique entity-relation graph parsing method for scanned forms called LAGNN, a language-independent Graph Neural Network model. Our model parses a form into a word-relation graph in order to identify entities and relations jointly and reduce the time complexity of inference. This graph is then transformed by deterministic rules into a fully connected entity-relation graph. Our model simply takes into account relative spacing between bounding boxes from layout information to facilitate easy transfer across languages. To further improve the performance of LAGNN, and achieve isomorphism between entity-relation graphs and word-relation graphs, we use integer linear programming (ILP) based inference. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/Bhanu068/LAGNN

Toward the Automated Construction of Probabilistic Knowledge Graphs for the Maritime Domain

International maritime crime is becoming increasingly sophisticated, often associated with wider criminal networks. Detecting maritime threats by means of fusing data purely related to physical movement (i.e., those generated by physical sensors, or hard data) is not sufficient. This has led to research and development efforts aimed at combining hard data with other types of data (especially human-generated or soft data). Existing work often assumes that input soft data is available in a structured format, or is focused on extracting certain relevant entities or concepts to accompany or annotate hard data. Much less attention has been given to extracting the rich knowledge about the situations of interest implicitly embedded in the large amount of soft data existing in unstructured formats (such as intelligence reports and news articles). In order to exploit the potentially useful and rich information from such sources, it is necessary to extract not only the relevant entities and concepts but also their semantic relations, together with the uncertainty associated with the extracted knowledge (i.e., in the form of probabilistic knowledge graphs). This will increase the accuracy of and confidence in, the extracted knowledge and facilitate subsequent reasoning and learning. To this end, we propose Maritime DeepDive, an initial prototype for the automated construction of probabilistic knowledge graphs from natural language data for the maritime domain. In this paper, we report on the current implementation of Maritime DeepDive, together with preliminary results on extracting probabilistic events from maritime piracy incidents. This pipeline was evaluated on a manually crafted gold standard, yielding promising results.

Few-shot Domain-Adaptive Visually-fused Event Detection from Text

Incorporating auxiliary modalities such as images into event detection models has attracted increasing interest over the last few years. The complexity of natural language in describing situations has motivated researchers to leverage the related visual context to improve event detection performance. However, current approaches in this area suffer from data scarcity, where a large amount of labelled text-image pairs are required for model training. Furthermore, limited access to the visual context at inference time negatively impacts the performance of such models, which makes them practically ineffective in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel domain-adaptive visually-fused event detection approach that can be trained on a few labelled image-text paired data points. Specifically, we introduce a visual imaginator method that synthesises images from text in the absence of visual context. Moreover, the imaginator can be customised to a specific domain. In doing so, our model can leverage the capabilities of pre-trained vision-language models and can be trained in a few-shot setting. This also allows for effective inference where only single-modality data (i.e. text) is available. The experimental evaluation on the benchmark M2E2 dataset shows that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, by up to 11 points.

On Robustness of Prompt-based Semantic Parsing with Large Pre-trained Language Model: An Empirical Study on Codex

Semantic parsing is a technique aimed at constructing a structured representation of the meaning of a natural-language question. Recent advancements in few-shot language models trained on code have demonstrated superior performance in generating these representations compared to traditional unimodal language models, which are trained on downstream tasks. Despite these advancements, existing fine-tuned neural semantic parsers are susceptible to adversarial attacks on natural-language inputs. While it has been established that the robustness of smaller semantic parsers can be enhanced through adversarial training, this approach is not feasible for large language models in real-world scenarios, as it requires both substantial computational resources and expensive human annotation on in-domain semantic parsing data. This paper presents the first empirical study on the adversarial robustness of a large prompt-based language model of code, \codex. Our results demonstrate that the state-of-the-art (SOTA) code-language models are vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial examples. To address this challenge, we propose methods for improving robustness without the need for significant amounts of labeled data or heavy computational resources.

Adaptive Population-based Simulated Annealing for Uncertain Resource Constrained Job Scheduling

Transporting ore from mines to ports is of significant interest in mining supply chains. These operations are commonly associated with growing costs and a lack of resources. Large mining companies are interested in optimally allocating their resources to reduce operational costs. This problem has been previously investigated in the literature as resource constrained job scheduling (RCJS). While a number of optimisation methods have been proposed to tackle the deterministic problem, the uncertainty associated with resource availability, an inevitable challenge in mining operations, has received less attention. RCJS with uncertainty is a hard combinatorial optimisation problem that cannot be solved efficiently with existing optimisation methods. This study proposes an adaptive population-based simulated annealing algorithm that can overcome the limitations of existing methods for RCJS with uncertainty including the premature convergence, the excessive number of hyper-parameters, and the inefficiency in coping with different uncertainty levels. This new algorithm is designed to effectively balance exploration and exploitation, by using a population, modifying the cooling schedule in the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, and using an adaptive mechanism to select perturbation operators. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods across a wide range of benchmark RCJS instances and uncertainty levels. Moreover, new best known solutions are discovered for all but one problem instance across all uncertainty levels.

Paraphrasing Techniques for Maritime QA system

There has been an increasing interest in incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Defence and military systems to complement and augment human intelligence and capabilities. However, much work still needs to be done toward achieving an effective human-machine partnership. This work is aimed at enhancing human-machine communications by developing a capability for automatically translating human natural language into a machine-understandable language (e.g., SQL queries). Techniques toward achieving this goal typically involve building a semantic parser trained on a very large amount of high-quality manually-annotated data. However, in many real-world Defence scenarios, it is not feasible to obtain such a large amount of training data. To the best of our knowledge, there are few works trying to explore the possibility of training a semantic parser with limited manually-paraphrased data, in other words, zero-shot. In this paper, we investigate how to exploit paraphrasing methods for the automated generation of large-scale training datasets (in the form of paraphrased utterances and their corresponding logical forms in SQL format) and present our experimental results using real-world data in the maritime domain.

Recovering Faces from Portraits with Auxiliary Facial Attributes

Recovering a photorealistic face from an artistic portrait is a challenging task since crucial facial details are often distorted or completely lost in artistic compositions. To handle this loss, we propose an Attribute-guided Face Recovery from Portraits (AFRP) that utilizes a Face Recovery Network (FRN) and a Discriminative Network (DN). FRN consists of an autoencoder with residual block-embedded skip-connections and incorporates facial attribute vectors into the feature maps of input portraits at the bottleneck of the autoencoder. DN has multiple convolutional and fully-connected layers, and its role is to enforce FRN to generate authentic face images with corresponding facial attributes dictated by the input attribute vectors. %Leveraging on the spatial transformer networks, FRN automatically compensates for misalignments of portraits. % and generates aligned face images. For the preservation of identities, we impose the recovered and ground-truth faces to share similar visual features. Specifically, DN determines whether the recovered image looks like a real face and checks if the facial attributes extracted from the recovered image are consistent with given attributes. %Our method can recover high-quality photorealistic faces from unaligned portraits while preserving the identity of the face images as well as it can reconstruct a photorealistic face image with a desired set of attributes. Our method can recover photorealistic identity-preserving faces with desired attributes from unseen stylized portraits, artistic paintings, and hand-drawn sketches. On large-scale synthesized and sketch datasets, we demonstrate that our face recovery method achieves state-of-the-art results.