FlexKBQA: A Flexible LLM-Powered Framework for Few-Shot Knowledge Base Question Answering

Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) is a critical yet challenging task due to the vast number of entities within knowledge bases and the diversity of natural language questions posed by users. Unfortunately, the performance of most KBQA models tends to decline significantly in real-world scenarios where high-quality annotated data is insufficient. To mitigate the burden associated with manual annotation, we introduce FlexKBQA by utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) as program translators for addressing the challenges inherent in the few-shot KBQA task. Specifically, FlexKBQA leverages automated algorithms to sample diverse programs, such as SPARQL queries, from the knowledge base, which are subsequently converted into natural language questions via LLMs. This synthetic dataset facilitates training a specialized lightweight model for the KB. Additionally, to reduce the barriers of distribution shift between synthetic data and real user questions, FlexKBQA introduces an executionguided self-training method to iterative leverage unlabeled user questions. Furthermore, we explore harnessing the inherent reasoning capability of LLMs to enhance the entire framework. Consequently, FlexKBQA delivers substantial flexibility, encompassing data annotation, deployment, and being domain agnostic. Through extensive experiments on GrailQA, WebQSP, and KQA Pro, we observe that under the few-shot even the more challenging zero-shot scenarios, FlexKBQA achieves impressive results with a few annotations, surpassing all previous baselines and even approaching the performance of supervised models, achieving a remarkable 93% performance relative to the fully-supervised models. We posit that FlexKBQA represents a significant advancement towards exploring better integration of large and lightweight models. The code is open-sourced.

Can LLMs like GPT-4 outperform traditional AI tools in dementia diagnosis? Maybe, but not today

Recent investigations show that large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4, not only have remarkable capabilities in common Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks but also exhibit human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks. However, whether GPT-4 can be directly used in practical applications and replace traditional artificial intelligence (AI) tools in specialized domains requires further experimental validation. In this paper, we explore the potential of LLMs such as GPT-4 to outperform traditional AI tools in dementia diagnosis. Comprehensive comparisons between GPT-4 and traditional AI tools are conducted to examine their diagnostic accuracy in a clinical setting. Experimental results on two real clinical datasets show that, although LLMs like GPT-4 demonstrate potential for future advancements in dementia diagnosis, they currently do not surpass the performance of traditional AI tools. The interpretability and faithfulness of GPT-4 are also evaluated by comparison with real doctors. We discuss the limitations of GPT-4 in its current state and propose future research directions to enhance GPT-4 in dementia diagnosis.

Bridging the Language Gap: Knowledge Injected Multilingual Question Answering

Question Answering (QA) is the task of automatically answering questions posed by humans in natural languages. There are different settings to answer a question, such as abstractive, extractive, boolean, and multiple-choice QA. As a popular topic in natural language processing tasks, extractive question answering task (extractive QA) has gained extensive attention in the past few years. With the continuous evolvement of the world, generalized cross-lingual transfer (G-XLT), where question and answer context are in different languages, poses some unique challenges over cross-lingual transfer (XLT), where question and answer context are in the same language. With the boost of corresponding development of related benchmarks, many works have been done to improve the performance of various language QA tasks. However, only a few works are dedicated to the G-XLT task. In this work, we propose a generalized cross-lingual transfer framework to enhance the model's ability to understand different languages. Specifically, we first assemble triples from different languages to form multilingual knowledge. Since the lack of knowledge between different languages greatly limits models' reasoning ability, we further design a knowledge injection strategy via leveraging link prediction techniques to enrich the model storage of multilingual knowledge. In this way, we can profoundly exploit rich semantic knowledge. Experiment results on real-world datasets MLQA demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the performance by a large margin, outperforming the baseline method by 13.18%/12.00% F1/EM on average.

Toward a Unified Framework for Unsupervised Complex Tabular Reasoning

Structured tabular data exist across nearly all fields. Reasoning task over these data aims to answer questions or determine the truthiness of hypothesis sentences by understanding the semantic meaning of a table. While previous works have devoted significant efforts to the tabular reasoning task, they always assume there are sufficient labeled data. However, constructing reasoning samples over tables (and related text) is labor-intensive, especially when the reasoning process is complex. When labeled data is insufficient, the performance of models will suffer an unendurable decline. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for unsupervised complex tabular reasoning (UCTR), which generates sufficient and diverse synthetic data with complex logic for tabular reasoning tasks, assuming no human-annotated data at all. We first utilize a random sampling strategy to collect diverse programs of different types and execute them on tables based on a "Program-Executor" module. To bridge the gap between the programs and natural language sentences, we design a powerful "NL-Generator" module to generate natural language sentences with complex logic from these programs. Since a table often occurs with its surrounding texts, we further propose novel "Table-to-Text" and "Text-to-Table" operators to handle joint table-text reasoning scenarios. This way, we can adequately exploit the unlabeled table resources to obtain a well-performed reasoning model under an unsupervised setting. Our experiments cover different tasks (question answering and fact verification) and different domains (general and specific), showing that our unsupervised methods can achieve at most 93% performance compared to supervised models. We also find that it can substantially boost the supervised performance in low-resourced domains as a data augmentation technique. Our code is available at https://github.com/leezythu/UCTR.

Not Just Plain Text! Fuel Document-Level Relation Extraction with Explicit Syntax Refinement and Subsentence Modeling

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to identify semantic labels among entities within a single document. One major challenge of DocRE is to dig decisive details regarding a specific entity pair from long text. However, in many cases, only a fraction of text carries required information, even in the manually labeled supporting evidence. To better capture and exploit instructive information, we propose a novel expLicit syntAx Refinement and Subsentence mOdeliNg based framework (LARSON). By introducing extra syntactic information, LARSON can model subsentences of arbitrary granularity and efficiently screen instructive ones. Moreover, we incorporate refined syntax into text representations which further improves the performance of LARSON. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets (DocRED, CDR, and GDA) demonstrate that LARSON significantly outperforms existing methods.

Effective Few-Shot Named Entity Linking by Meta-Learning

Entity linking aims to link ambiguous mentions to their corresponding entities in a knowledge base, which is significant and fundamental for various downstream applications, e.g., knowledge base completion, question answering, and information extraction. While great efforts have been devoted to this task, most of these studies follow the assumption that large-scale labeled data is available. However, when the labeled data is insufficient for specific domains due to labor-intensive annotation work, the performance of existing algorithms will suffer an intolerable decline. In this paper, we endeavor to solve the problem of few-shot entity linking, which only requires a minimal amount of in-domain labeled data and is more practical in real situations. Specifically, we firstly propose a novel weak supervision strategy to generate non-trivial synthetic entity-mention pairs based on mention rewriting. Since the quality of the synthetic data has a critical impact on effective model training, we further design a meta-learning mechanism to assign different weights to each synthetic entity-mention pair automatically. Through this way, we can profoundly exploit rich and precious semantic information to derive a well-trained entity linking model under the few-shot setting. The experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed method can extensively improve the state-of-the-art few-shot entity linking model and achieve impressive performance when only a small amount of labeled data is available. Moreover, we also demonstrate the outstanding ability of the model's transferability.