arXiv subjects

Jian-Yun Nie

Publications and source records attributed to Jian-Yun Nie.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

A Survey on Large Language Models with Multilingualism: Recent Advances and New Frontiers

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrates remarkable multilingual capabilities in natural language processing, attracting global attention in both academia and industry. To mitigate potential discrimination and enhance the overall usability and accessibility for diverse language user groups, it is important for the development of language-fair technology. Despite the breakthroughs of LLMs, the investigation into the multilingual scenario remains insufficient, where a comprehensive survey to summarize recent approaches, developments, limitations, and potential solutions is desirable. To this end, we provide a survey with multiple perspectives on the utilization of LLMs in the multilingual scenario. We first rethink the transitions between previous and current research on pre-trained language models. Then we introduce several perspectives on the multilingualism of LLMs, including training and inference methods, information retrieval, model security, multi-domain with language culture, and usage of datasets. We also discuss the major challenges that arise in these aspects, along with possible solutions. Besides, we highlight future research directions that aim at further enhancing LLMs with multilingualism. The survey aims to help the research community address multilingual problems and provide a comprehensive understanding of the core concepts, key techniques, and latest developments in multilingual natural language processing based on LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

RALI@TREC iKAT 2024: Achieving Personalization via Retrieval Fusion in Conversational Search

The Recherche Appliquee en Linguistique Informatique (RALI) team participated in the 2024 TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance (iKAT) Track. In personalized conversational search, effectively capturing a user's complex search intent requires incorporating both contextual information and key elements from the user profile into query reformulation. The user profile often contains many relevant pieces, and each could potentially complement the user's information needs. It is difficult to disregard any of them, whereas introducing an excessive number of these pieces risks drifting from the original query and hinders search performance. This is a challenge we denote as over-personalization. To address this, we propose different strategies by fusing ranking lists generated from the queries with different levels of personalization.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Mixture of Latent Experts Using Tensor Products

In multi-task learning, the conventional approach involves training a model on multiple tasks simultaneously. However, the training signals from different tasks can interfere with one another, potentially leading to \textit{negative transfer}. To mitigate this, we investigate if modular language models can facilitate positive transfer and systematic generalization. Specifically, we propose a novel modular language model (\texttt{TensorPoly}), that balances parameter efficiency with nuanced routing methods. For \textit{modules}, we reparameterize Low-Rank Adaptation (\texttt{LoRA}) by employing an entangled tensor through the use of tensor product operations and name the resulting approach \texttt{TLoRA}. For \textit{routing function}, we tailor two innovative routing functions according to the granularity: \texttt{TensorPoly-I} which directs to each rank within the entangled tensor while \texttt{TensorPoly-II} offers a finer-grained routing approach targeting each order of the entangled tensor. The experimental results from the multi-task T0-benchmark demonstrate that: 1) all modular LMs surpass the corresponding dense approaches, highlighting the potential of modular language models to mitigate negative inference in multi-task learning and deliver superior outcomes. 2) \texttt{TensorPoly-I} achieves higher parameter efficiency in adaptation and outperforms other modular LMs, which shows the potential of our approach in multi-task transfer learning.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

CHIQ: Contextual History Enhancement for Improving Query Rewriting in Conversational Search

In this paper, we study how open-source large language models (LLMs) can be effectively deployed for improving query rewriting in conversational search, especially for ambiguous queries. We introduce CHIQ, a two-step method that leverages the capabilities of LLMs to resolve ambiguities in the conversation history before query rewriting. This approach contrasts with prior studies that predominantly use closed-source LLMs to directly generate search queries from conversation history. We demonstrate on five well-established benchmarks that CHIQ leads to state-of-the-art results across most settings, showing highly competitive performances with systems leveraging closed-source LLMs. Our study provides a first step towards leveraging open-source LLMs in conversational search, as a competitive alternative to the prevailing reliance on commercial LLMs. Data, models, and source code will be publicly available upon acceptance at https://github.com/fengranMark/CHIQ.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings

We introduce C-Pack, a package of resources that significantly advance the field of general Chinese embeddings. C-Pack includes three critical resources. 1) C-MTEB is a comprehensive benchmark for Chinese text embeddings covering 6 tasks and 35 datasets. 2) C-MTP is a massive text embedding dataset curated from labeled and unlabeled Chinese corpora for training embedding models. 3) C-TEM is a family of embedding models covering multiple sizes. Our models outperform all prior Chinese text embeddings on C-MTEB by up to +10% upon the time of the release. We also integrate and optimize the entire suite of training methods for C-TEM. Along with our resources on general Chinese embedding, we release our data and models for English text embeddings. The English models achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB benchmark; meanwhile, our released English data is 2 times larger than the Chinese data. All these resources are made publicly available at https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

A User-Centric Multi-Intent Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are essential tools that users employ across various scenarios, so evaluating their performance and guiding users in selecting the suitable service is important. Although many benchmarks exist, they mainly focus on specific predefined model abilities, such as world knowledge, reasoning, etc. Based on these ability scores, it is hard for users to determine which LLM best suits their particular needs. To address these issues, we propose to evaluate LLMs from a user-centric perspective and design this benchmark to measure their efficacy in satisfying user needs under distinct intents. Firstly, we collect 1,846 real-world use cases from a user study with 712 participants from 23 countries. This first-hand data helps us understand actual user intents and needs in LLM interactions, forming the User Reported Scenarios (URS) dataset, which is categorized with six types of user intents. Secondly, based on this authentic dataset, we benchmark 10 LLM services with GPT-4-as-Judge. Thirdly, we show that benchmark scores align well with human preference in both real-world experience and pair-wise annotations, achieving Pearson correlations of 0.95 and 0.94, respectively. This alignment confirms that the URS dataset and our evaluation method establish an effective user-centric benchmark. The dataset, code, and process data are available at https://github.com/Alice1998/URS.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Aligning Query Representation with Rewritten Query and Relevance Judgments in Conversational Search

Conversational search supports multi-turn user-system interactions to solve complex information needs. Different from the traditional single-turn ad-hoc search, conversational search encounters a more challenging problem of context-dependent query understanding with the lengthy and long-tail conversational history context. While conversational query rewriting methods leverage explicit rewritten queries to train a rewriting model to transform the context-dependent query into a stand-stone search query, this is usually done without considering the quality of search results. Conversational dense retrieval methods use fine-tuning to improve a pre-trained ad-hoc query encoder, but they are limited by the conversational search data available for training. In this paper, we leverage both rewritten queries and relevance judgments in the conversational search data to train a better query representation model. The key idea is to align the query representation with those of rewritten queries and relevant documents. The proposed model -- Query Representation Alignment Conversational Dense Retriever, QRACDR, is tested on eight datasets, including various settings in conversational search and ad-hoc search. The results demonstrate the strong performance of QRACDR compared with state-of-the-art methods, and confirm the effectiveness of representation alignment.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

How to Leverage Personal Textual Knowledge for Personalized Conversational Information Retrieval

Personalized conversational information retrieval (CIR) combines conversational and personalizable elements to satisfy various users' complex information needs through multi-turn interaction based on their backgrounds. The key promise is that the personal textual knowledge base (PTKB) can improve the CIR effectiveness because the retrieval results can be more related to the user's background. However, PTKB is noisy: not every piece of knowledge in PTKB is relevant to the specific query at hand. In this paper, we explore and test several ways to select knowledge from PTKB and use it for query reformulation by using a large language model (LLM). The experimental results show the PTKB might not always improve the search results when used alone, but LLM can help generate a more appropriate personalized query when high-quality guidance is provided.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

CoSPLADE: Contextualizing SPLADE for Conversational Information Retrieval

Conversational search is a difficult task as it aims at retrieving documents based not only on the current user query but also on the full conversation history. Most of the previous methods have focused on a multi-stage ranking approach relying on query reformulation, a critical intermediate step that might lead to a sub-optimal retrieval. Other approaches have tried to use a fully neural IR first-stage, but are either zero-shot or rely on full learning-to-rank based on a dataset with pseudo-labels. In this work, leveraging the CANARD dataset, we propose an innovative lightweight learning technique to train a first-stage ranker based on SPLADE. By relying on SPLADE sparse representations, we show that, when combined with a second-stage ranker based on T5Mono, the results are competitive on the TREC CAsT 2020 and 2021 tracks.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Boosting Biomedical Concept Extraction by Rule-Based Data Augmentation

Document-level biomedical concept extraction is the task of identifying biomedical concepts mentioned in a given document. Recent advancements have adapted pre-trained language models for this task. However, the scarcity of domain-specific data and the deviation of concepts from their canonical names often hinder these models' effectiveness. To tackle this issue, we employ MetaMapLite, an existing rule-based concept mapping system, to generate additional pseudo-annotated data from PubMed and PMC. The annotated data are used to augment the limited training data. Through extensive experiments, this study demonstrates the utility of a manually crafted concept mapping tool for training a better concept extraction model.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Exploring the Best Practices of Query Expansion with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are foundational in language technologies, particularly in information retrieval (IR). Previous studies have utilized LLMs for query expansion, achieving notable improvements in IR. In this paper, we thoroughly explore the best practice of leveraging LLMs for query expansion. To this end, we introduce a training-free, straightforward yet effective framework called Multi-Text Generation Integration (\textsc{MuGI}). It leverages LLMs to generate multiple pseudo-references, integrating them with queries to enhance both sparse and dense retrievers. Our empirical findings reveal that: (1) Increasing the number of samples from LLMs benefits IR systems; (2) A balance between the query and pseudo-documents, and an effective integration strategy, is critical for high performance; (3) Contextual information from LLMs is essential, even boost a 23M model to outperform a 7B baseline model; (4) Pseudo relevance feedback can further calibrate queries for improved performance; and (5) Query expansion is widely applicable and versatile, consistently enhancing models ranging from 23M to 7B parameters. Our code and all generated references are made available at \url{https://github.com/lezhang7/Retrieval_MuGI}

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Unifying Graph Convolution and Contrastive Learning in Collaborative Filtering

Graph-based models and contrastive learning have emerged as prominent methods in Collaborative Filtering (CF). While many existing models in CF incorporate these methods in their design, there seems to be a limited depth of analysis regarding the foundational principles behind them. This paper bridges graph convolution, a pivotal element of graph-based models, with contrastive learning through a theoretical framework. By examining the learning dynamics and equilibrium of the contrastive loss, we offer a fresh lens to understand contrastive learning via graph theory, emphasizing its capability to capture high-order connectivity. Building on this analysis, we further show that the graph convolutional layers often used in graph-based models are not essential for high-order connectivity modeling and might contribute to the risk of oversmoothing. Stemming from our findings, we introduce Simple Contrastive Collaborative Filtering (SCCF), a simple and effective algorithm based on a naive embedding model and a modified contrastive loss. The efficacy of the algorithm is demonstrated through extensive experiments across four public datasets. The experiment code is available at \url{https://github.com/wu1hong/SCCF}. \end{abstract}

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

History-Aware Conversational Dense Retrieval

Conversational search facilitates complex information retrieval by enabling multi-turn interactions between users and the system. Supporting such interactions requires a comprehensive understanding of the conversational inputs to formulate a good search query based on historical information. In particular, the search query should include the relevant information from the previous conversation turns. However, current approaches for conversational dense retrieval primarily rely on fine-tuning a pre-trained ad-hoc retriever using the whole conversational search session, which can be lengthy and noisy. Moreover, existing approaches are limited by the amount of manual supervision signals in the existing datasets. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a History-Aware Conversational Dense Retrieval (HAConvDR) system, which incorporates two ideas: context-denoised query reformulation and automatic mining of supervision signals based on the actual impact of historical turns. Experiments on two public conversational search datasets demonstrate the improved history modeling capability of HAConvDR, in particular for long conversations with topic shifts.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

ConvSDG: Session Data Generation for Conversational Search

Conversational search provides a more convenient interface for users to search by allowing multi-turn interaction with the search engine. However, the effectiveness of the conversational dense retrieval methods is limited by the scarcity of training data required for their fine-tuning. Thus, generating more training conversational sessions with relevant labels could potentially improve search performance. Based on the promising capabilities of large language models (LLMs) on text generation, we propose ConvSDG, a simple yet effective framework to explore the feasibility of boosting conversational search by using LLM for session data generation. Within this framework, we design dialogue/session-level and query-level data generation with unsupervised and semi-supervised learning, according to the availability of relevance judgments. The generated data are used to fine-tune the conversational dense retriever. Extensive experiments on four widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and broad applicability of our ConvSDG framework compared with several strong baselines.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

PAQA: Toward ProActive Open-Retrieval Question Answering

Conversational systems have made significant progress in generating natural language responses. However, their potential as conversational search systems is currently limited due to their passive role in the information-seeking process. One major limitation is the scarcity of datasets that provide labelled ambiguous questions along with a supporting corpus of documents and relevant clarifying questions. This work aims to tackle the challenge of generating relevant clarifying questions by taking into account the inherent ambiguities present in both user queries and documents. To achieve this, we propose PAQA, an extension to the existing AmbiNQ dataset, incorporating clarifying questions. We then evaluate various models and assess how passage retrieval impacts ambiguity detection and the generation of clarifying questions. By addressing this gap in conversational search systems, we aim to provide additional supervision to enhance their active participation in the information-seeking process and provide users with more accurate results.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Metacognitive Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models

Retrieval-augmented generation have become central in natural language processing due to their efficacy in generating factual content. While traditional methods employ single-time retrieval, more recent approaches have shifted towards multi-time retrieval for multi-hop reasoning tasks. However, these strategies are bound by predefined reasoning steps, potentially leading to inaccuracies in response generation. This paper introduces MetaRAG, an approach that combines the retrieval-augmented generation process with metacognition. Drawing from cognitive psychology, metacognition allows an entity to self-reflect and critically evaluate its cognitive processes. By integrating this, MetaRAG enables the model to monitor, evaluate, and plan its response strategies, enhancing its introspective reasoning abilities. Through a three-step metacognitive regulation pipeline, the model can identify inadequacies in initial cognitive responses and fixes them. Empirical evaluations show that MetaRAG significantly outperforms existing methods.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

ConvGQR: Generative Query Reformulation for Conversational Search

In conversational search, the user's real search intent for the current turn is dependent on the previous conversation history. It is challenging to determine a good search query from the whole conversation context. To avoid the expensive re-training of the query encoder, most existing methods try to learn a rewriting model to de-contextualize the current query by mimicking the manual query rewriting. However, manually rewritten queries are not always the best search queries. Training a rewriting model on them would limit the model's ability to produce good search queries. Another useful hint is the potential answer to the question. In this paper, we propose ConvGQR, a new framework to reformulate conversational queries based on generative pre-trained language models (PLMs), one for query rewriting and another for generating potential answers. By combining both, ConvGQR can produce better search queries. In addition, to relate query reformulation to retrieval performance, we propose a knowledge infusion mechanism to optimize both query reformulation and retrieval. Extensive experiments on four conversational search datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ConvGQR.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Understanding User Experience in Large Language Model Interactions

In the rapidly evolving landscape of large language models (LLMs), most research has primarily viewed them as independent individuals, focusing on assessing their capabilities through standardized benchmarks and enhancing their general intelligence. This perspective, however, tends to overlook the vital role of LLMs as user-centric services in human-AI collaboration. This gap in research becomes increasingly critical as LLMs become more integrated into people's everyday and professional interactions. This study addresses the important need to understand user satisfaction with LLMs by exploring four key aspects: comprehending user intents, scrutinizing user experiences, addressing major user concerns about current LLM services, and charting future research paths to bolster human-AI collaborations. Our study develops a taxonomy of 7 user intents in LLM interactions, grounded in analysis of real-world user interaction logs and human verification. Subsequently, we conduct a user survey to gauge their satisfaction with LLM services, encompassing usage frequency, experiences across intents, and predominant concerns. This survey, compiling 411 anonymous responses, uncovers 11 first-hand insights into the current state of user engagement with LLMs. Based on this empirical analysis, we pinpoint 6 future research directions prioritizing the user perspective in LLM developments. This user-centered approach is essential for crafting LLMs that are not just technologically advanced but also resonate with the intricate realities of human interactions and real-world applications.

cs.HC↗