Towards Effective Ancient Chinese Translation: Dataset, Model, and Evaluation

Interpreting ancient Chinese has been the key to comprehending vast Chinese literature, tradition, and civilization. In this paper, we propose Erya for ancient Chinese translation. From a dataset perspective, we collect, clean, and classify ancient Chinese materials from various sources, forming the most extensive ancient Chinese resource to date. From a model perspective, we devise Erya training method oriented towards ancient Chinese. We design two jointly-working tasks: disyllabic aligned substitution (DAS) and dual masked language model (DMLM). From an evaluation perspective, we build a benchmark to judge ancient Chinese translation quality in different scenarios and evaluate the ancient Chinese translation capacities of various existing models. Our model exhibits remarkable zero-shot performance across five domains, with over +12.0 BLEU against GPT-3.5 models and better human evaluation results than ERNIE Bot. Subsequent fine-tuning further shows the superior transfer capability of Erya model with +6.2 BLEU gain. We release all the above-mentioned resources at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Erya.

Learning to Imagine: Visually-Augmented Natural Language Generation

People often imagine relevant scenes to aid in the writing process. In this work, we aim to utilize visual information for composition in the same manner as humans. We propose a method, LIVE, that makes pre-trained language models (PLMs) Learn to Imagine for Visuallyaugmented natural language gEneration. First, we imagine the scene based on the text: we use a diffusion model to synthesize high-quality images conditioned on the input texts. Second, we use CLIP to determine whether the text can evoke the imagination in a posterior way. Finally, our imagination is dynamic, and we conduct synthesis for each sentence rather than generate only one image for an entire paragraph. Technically, we propose a novel plug-and-play fusion layer to obtain visually-augmented representations for each text. Our vision-text fusion layer is compatible with Transformerbased architecture. We have conducted extensive experiments on four generation tasks using BART and T5, and the automatic results and human evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. We will release the code, model, and data at the link: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LIVE.

Zero-shot Visual Question Answering with Language Model Feedback

In this paper, we propose a novel language model guided captioning approach, LAMOC, for knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA). Our approach employs the generated captions by a captioning model as the context of an answer prediction model, which is a Pre-trained Language model (PLM). As the major contribution, we leverage the guidance and feedback of the prediction model to improve the capability of the captioning model. In this way, the captioning model can become aware of the task goal and information need from the PLM. To develop our approach, we design two specific training stages, where the first stage adapts the captioning model to the prediction model (selecting more suitable caption propositions for training) and the second stage tunes the captioning model according to the task goal (learning from feedback of the PLM). Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on the knowledge-based VQA task. Specifically, on the challenging A-OKVQA dataset, LAMOC outperforms several competitive zero-shot methods and even achieves comparable results to a fine-tuned VLP model. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LAMOC.

Not All Metrics Are Guilty: Improving NLG Evaluation with LLM Paraphrasing

Most research about natural language generation (NLG) relies on evaluation benchmarks with limited references for a sample, which may result in poor correlations with human judgements. The underlying reason is that one semantic meaning can actually be expressed in different forms, and the evaluation with a single or few references may not accurately reflect the quality of the model's hypotheses. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel method, named Para-Ref, to enhance existing evaluation benchmarks by enriching the number of references. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to paraphrase a single reference into multiple high-quality ones in diverse expressions. Experimental results on representative NLG tasks of machine translation, text summarization, and image caption demonstrate that our method can effectively improve the correlation with human evaluation for sixteen automatic evaluation metrics by +7.82% in ratio. We release the code and data at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Para-Ref.

The Web Can Be Your Oyster for Improving Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) encode a large amount of world knowledge. However, as such knowledge is frozen at the time of model training, the models become static and limited by the training data at that time. In order to further improve the capacity of LLMs for knowledge-intensive tasks, we consider augmenting LLMs with the large-scale web using search engine. Unlike previous augmentation sources (e.g., Wikipedia data dump), the web provides broader, more comprehensive and constantly updated information. In this paper, we present a web-augmented LLM UNIWEB, which is trained over 16 knowledge-intensive tasks in a unified text-to-text format. Instead of simply using the retrieved contents from web, our approach has made two major improvements. Firstly, we propose an adaptive search engine assisted learning method that can self-evaluate the confidence level of LLM's predictions, and adaptively determine when to refer to the web for more data, which can avoid useless or noisy augmentation from web. Secondly, we design a pretraining task, i.e., continual knowledge learning, based on salient spans prediction, to reduce the discrepancy between the encoded and retrieved knowledge. Experiments on a wide range of knowledge-intensive tasks show that our model significantly outperforms previous retrieval-augmented methods.

Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive multilingual capability, but their performance varies substantially across different languages. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective method, called cross-lingual-thought prompting (XLT), to systematically improve the multilingual capability of LLMs. Specifically, XLT is a generic template prompt that stimulates cross-lingual and logical reasoning skills to enhance task performance across languages. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on 7 typical benchmarks related to reasoning, understanding, and generation tasks, covering both high-resource and low-resource languages. Experimental results show that XLT not only remarkably enhances the performance of various multilingual tasks but also significantly reduces the gap between the average performance and the best performance of each task in different languages. Notably, XLT brings over 10 points of average improvement in arithmetic reasoning and open-domain question-answering tasks.

A Survey of Large Language Models

Language is essentially a complex, intricate system of human expressions governed by grammatical rules. It poses a significant challenge to develop capable AI algorithms for comprehending and grasping a language. As a major approach, language modeling has been widely studied for language understanding and generation in the past two decades, evolving from statistical language models to neural language models. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been proposed by pre-training Transformer models over large-scale corpora, showing strong capabilities in solving various NLP tasks. Since researchers have found that model scaling can lead to performance improvement, they further study the scaling effect by increasing the model size to an even larger size. Interestingly, when the parameter scale exceeds a certain level, these enlarged language models not only achieve a significant performance improvement but also show some special abilities that are not present in small-scale language models. To discriminate the difference in parameter scale, the research community has coined the term large language models (LLM) for the PLMs of significant size. Recently, the research on LLMs has been largely advanced by both academia and industry, and a remarkable progress is the launch of ChatGPT, which has attracted widespread attention from society. The technical evolution of LLMs has been making an important impact on the entire AI community, which would revolutionize the way how we develop and use AI algorithms. In this survey, we review the recent advances of LLMs by introducing the background, key findings, and mainstream techniques. In particular, we focus on four major aspects of LLMs, namely pre-training, adaptation tuning, utilization, and capacity evaluation. Besides, we also summarize the available resources for developing LLMs and discuss the remaining issues for future directions.