VLUE: A New Benchmark and Multi-task Knowledge Transfer Learning for Vietnamese Natural Language Understanding

The success of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) benchmarks in various languages, such as GLUE for English, CLUE for Chinese, KLUE for Korean, and IndoNLU for Indonesian, has facilitated the evaluation of new NLU models across a wide range of tasks. To establish a standardized set of benchmarks for Vietnamese NLU, we introduce the first Vietnamese Language Understanding Evaluation (VLUE) benchmark. The VLUE benchmark encompasses five datasets covering different NLU tasks, including text classification, span extraction, and natural language understanding. To provide an insightful overview of the current state of Vietnamese NLU, we then evaluate seven state-of-the-art pre-trained models, including both multilingual and Vietnamese monolingual models, on our proposed VLUE benchmark. Furthermore, we present CafeBERT, a new state-of-the-art pre-trained model that achieves superior results across all tasks in the VLUE benchmark. Our model combines the proficiency of a multilingual pre-trained model with Vietnamese linguistic knowledge. CafeBERT is developed based on the XLM-RoBERTa model, with an additional pretraining step utilizing a significant amount of Vietnamese textual data to enhance its adaptation to the Vietnamese language. For the purpose of future research, CafeBERT is made publicly available for research purposes.

VlogQA: Task, Dataset, and Baseline Models for Vietnamese Spoken-Based Machine Reading Comprehension

This paper presents the development process of a Vietnamese spoken language corpus for machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks and provides insights into the challenges and opportunities associated with using real-world data for machine reading comprehension tasks. The existing MRC corpora in Vietnamese mainly focus on formal written documents such as Wikipedia articles, online newspapers, or textbooks. In contrast, the VlogQA consists of 10,076 question-answer pairs based on 1,230 transcript documents sourced from YouTube -- an extensive source of user-uploaded content, covering the topics of food and travel. By capturing the spoken language of native Vietnamese speakers in natural settings, an obscure corner overlooked in Vietnamese research, the corpus provides a valuable resource for future research in reading comprehension tasks for the Vietnamese language. Regarding performance evaluation, our deep-learning models achieved the highest F1 score of 75.34% on the test set, indicating significant progress in machine reading comprehension for Vietnamese spoken language data. In terms of EM, the highest score we accomplished is 53.97%, which reflects the challenge in processing spoken-based content and highlights the need for further improvement.

ViLexNorm: A Lexical Normalization Corpus for Vietnamese Social Media Text

Lexical normalization, a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), involves the transformation of words into their canonical forms. This process has been proven to benefit various downstream NLP tasks greatly. In this work, we introduce Vietnamese Lexical Normalization (ViLexNorm), the first-ever corpus developed for the Vietnamese lexical normalization task. The corpus comprises over 10,000 pairs of sentences meticulously annotated by human annotators, sourced from public comments on Vietnam's most popular social media platforms. Various methods were used to evaluate our corpus, and the best-performing system achieved a result of 57.74% using the Error Reduction Rate (ERR) metric (van der Goot, 2019a) with the Leave-As-Is (LAI) baseline. For extrinsic evaluation, employing the model trained on ViLexNorm demonstrates the positive impact of the Vietnamese lexical normalization task on other NLP tasks. Our corpus is publicly available exclusively for research purposes.

Automatic Textual Normalization for Hate Speech Detection

Social media data is a valuable resource for research, yet it contains a wide range of non-standard words (NSW). These irregularities hinder the effective operation of NLP tools. Current state-of-the-art methods for the Vietnamese language address this issue as a problem of lexical normalization, involving the creation of manual rules or the implementation of multi-staged deep learning frameworks, which necessitate extensive efforts to craft intricate rules. In contrast, our approach is straightforward, employing solely a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model. In this research, we provide a dataset for textual normalization, comprising 2,181 human-annotated comments with an inter-annotator agreement of 0.9014. By leveraging the Seq2Seq model for textual normalization, our results reveal that the accuracy achieved falls slightly short of 70%. Nevertheless, textual normalization enhances the accuracy of the Hate Speech Detection (HSD) task by approximately 2%, demonstrating its potential to improve the performance of complex NLP tasks. Our dataset is accessible for research purposes.

ViSoBERT: A Pre-Trained Language Model for Vietnamese Social Media Text Processing

English and Chinese, known as resource-rich languages, have witnessed the strong development of transformer-based language models for natural language processing tasks. Although Vietnam has approximately 100M people speaking Vietnamese, several pre-trained models, e.g., PhoBERT, ViBERT, and vELECTRA, performed well on general Vietnamese NLP tasks, including POS tagging and named entity recognition. These pre-trained language models are still limited to Vietnamese social media tasks. In this paper, we present the first monolingual pre-trained language model for Vietnamese social media texts, ViSoBERT, which is pre-trained on a large-scale corpus of high-quality and diverse Vietnamese social media texts using XLM-R architecture. Moreover, we explored our pre-trained model on five important natural language downstream tasks on Vietnamese social media texts: emotion recognition, hate speech detection, sentiment analysis, spam reviews detection, and hate speech spans detection. Our experiments demonstrate that ViSoBERT, with far fewer parameters, surpasses the previous state-of-the-art models on multiple Vietnamese social media tasks. Our ViSoBERT model is available only for research purposes.

ViCLEVR: A Visual Reasoning Dataset and Hybrid Multimodal Fusion Model for Visual Question Answering in Vietnamese

In recent years, Visual Question Answering (VQA) has gained significant attention for its diverse applications, including intelligent car assistance, aiding visually impaired individuals, and document image information retrieval using natural language queries. VQA requires effective integration of information from questions and images to generate accurate answers. Neural models for VQA have made remarkable progress on large-scale datasets, with a primary focus on resource-rich languages like English. To address this, we introduce the ViCLEVR dataset, a pioneering collection for evaluating various visual reasoning capabilities in Vietnamese while mitigating biases. The dataset comprises over 26,000 images and 30,000 question-answer pairs (QAs), each question annotated to specify the type of reasoning involved. Leveraging this dataset, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of contemporary visual reasoning systems, offering valuable insights into their strengths and limitations. Furthermore, we present PhoVIT, a comprehensive multimodal fusion that identifies objects in images based on questions. The architecture effectively employs transformers to enable simultaneous reasoning over textual and visual data, merging both modalities at an early model stage. The experimental findings demonstrate that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across four evaluation metrics. The accompanying code and dataset have been made publicly accessible at \url{https://github.com/kvt0012/ViCLEVR}. This provision seeks to stimulate advancements within the research community, fostering the development of more multimodal fusion algorithms, specifically tailored to address the nuances of low-resource languages, exemplified by Vietnamese.

XGV-BERT: Leveraging Contextualized Language Model and Graph Neural Network for Efficient Software Vulnerability Detection

With the advancement of deep learning (DL) in various fields, there are many attempts to reveal software vulnerabilities by data-driven approach. Nonetheless, such existing works lack the effective representation that can retain the non-sequential semantic characteristics and contextual relationship of source code attributes. Hence, in this work, we propose XGV-BERT, a framework that combines the pre-trained CodeBERT model and Graph Neural Network (GCN) to detect software vulnerabilities. By jointly training the CodeBERT and GCN modules within XGV-BERT, the proposed model leverages the advantages of large-scale pre-training, harnessing vast raw data, and transfer learning by learning representations for training data through graph convolution. The research results demonstrate that the XGV-BERT method significantly improves vulnerability detection accuracy compared to two existing methods such as VulDeePecker and SySeVR. For the VulDeePecker dataset, XGV-BERT achieves an impressive F1-score of 97.5%, significantly outperforming VulDeePecker, which achieved an F1-score of 78.3%. Again, with the SySeVR dataset, XGV-BERT achieves an F1-score of 95.5%, surpassing the results of SySeVR with an F1-score of 83.5%.

ViCGCN: Graph Convolutional Network with Contextualized Language Models for Social Media Mining in Vietnamese

Social media processing is a fundamental task in natural language processing with numerous applications. As Vietnamese social media and information science have grown rapidly, the necessity of information-based mining on Vietnamese social media has become crucial. However, state-of-the-art research faces several significant drawbacks, including imbalanced data and noisy data on social media platforms. Imbalanced and noisy are two essential issues that need to be addressed in Vietnamese social media texts. Graph Convolutional Networks can address the problems of imbalanced and noisy data in text classification on social media by taking advantage of the graph structure of the data. This study presents a novel approach based on contextualized language model (PhoBERT) and graph-based method (Graph Convolutional Networks). In particular, the proposed approach, ViCGCN, jointly trained the power of Contextualized embeddings with the ability of Graph Convolutional Networks, GCN, to capture more syntactic and semantic dependencies to address those drawbacks. Extensive experiments on various Vietnamese benchmark datasets were conducted to verify our approach. The observation shows that applying GCN to BERTology models as the final layer significantly improves performance. Moreover, the experiments demonstrate that ViCGCN outperforms 13 powerful baseline models, including BERTology models, fusion BERTology and GCN models, other baselines, and SOTA on three benchmark social media datasets. Our proposed ViCGCN approach demonstrates a significant improvement of up to 6.21%, 4.61%, and 2.63% over the best Contextualized Language Models, including multilingual and monolingual, on three benchmark datasets, UIT-VSMEC, UIT-ViCTSD, and UIT-VSFC, respectively. Additionally, our integrated model ViCGCN achieves the best performance compared to other BERTology integrated with GCN models.

Link Prediction for Wikipedia Articles as a Natural Language Inference Task

Link prediction task is vital to automatically understanding the structure of large knowledge bases. In this paper, we present our system to solve this task at the Data Science and Advanced Analytics 2023 Competition "Efficient and Effective Link Prediction" (DSAA-2023 Competition) with a corpus containing 948,233 training and 238,265 for public testing. This paper introduces an approach to link prediction in Wikipedia articles by formulating it as a natural language inference (NLI) task. Drawing inspiration from recent advancements in natural language processing and understanding, we cast link prediction as an NLI task, wherein the presence of a link between two articles is treated as a premise, and the task is to determine whether this premise holds based on the information presented in the articles. We implemented our system based on the Sentence Pair Classification for Link Prediction for the Wikipedia Articles task. Our system achieved 0.99996 Macro F1-score and 1.00000 Macro F1-score for the public and private test sets, respectively. Our team UIT-NLP ranked 3rd in performance on the private test set, equal to the scores of the first and second places. Our code is publicly for research purposes.