Daily Papers

The rapid evolution of generative AI necessitates robust safety evaluations. However, current safety datasets are predominantly English-centric, failing to capture specific risks in non-English, socio-cultural contexts such as Korean, and are often limited to the text modality. To address this gap, we introduce AssurAI, a new quality-controlled Korean multimodal dataset for evaluating the safety of generative AI. First, we define a taxonomy of 35 distinct AI risk factors, adapted from established frameworks by a multidisciplinary expert group to cover both universal harms and relevance to the Korean socio-cultural context. Second, leveraging this taxonomy, we construct and release AssurAI, a large-scale Korean multimodal dataset comprising 11,480 instances across text, image, video, and audio. Third, we apply the rigorous quality control process used to ensure data integrity, featuring a two-phase construction (i.e., expert-led seeding and crowdsourced scaling), triple independent annotation, and an iterative expert red-teaming loop. Our pilot study validates AssurAI's effectiveness in assessing the safety of recent LLMs. We release AssurAI to the public to facilitate the development of safer and more reliable generative AI systems for the Korean community.

Language models (LMs) often struggle to generate diverse, human-like creative content, raising concerns about the long-term homogenization of human thought through repeated exposure to similar outputs. Yet scalable methods for evaluating LM output diversity remain limited, especially beyond narrow tasks such as random number or name generation, or beyond repeated sampling from a single model. We introduce Infinity-Chat, a large-scale dataset of 26K diverse, real-world, open-ended user queries that admit a wide range of plausible answers with no single ground truth. We introduce the first comprehensive taxonomy for characterizing the full spectrum of open-ended prompts posed to LMs, comprising 6 top-level categories (e.g., brainstorm & ideation) that further breaks down to 17 subcategories. Using Infinity-Chat, we present a large-scale study of mode collapse in LMs, revealing a pronounced Artificial Hivemind effect in open-ended generation of LMs, characterized by (1) intra-model repetition, where a single model consistently generates similar responses, and more so (2) inter-model homogeneity, where different models produce strikingly similar outputs. Infinity-Chat also includes 31,250 human annotations, across absolute ratings and pairwise preferences, with 25 independent human annotations per example. This enables studying collective and individual-specific human preferences in response to open-ended queries. Our findings show that LMs, reward models, and LM judges are less well calibrated to human ratings on model generations that elicit differing idiosyncratic annotator preferences, despite maintaining comparable overall quality. Overall, INFINITY-CHAT presents the first large-scale resource for systematically studying real-world open-ended queries to LMs, revealing critical insights to guide future research for mitigating long-term AI safety risks posed by the Artificial Hivemind.

This work presents a graph neural network (GNN) framework for solving the maximum independent set (MIS) problem, inspired by dynamic programming (DP). Specifically, given a graph, we propose a DP-like recursive algorithm based on GNNs that firstly constructs two smaller sub-graphs, predicts the one with the larger MIS, and then uses it in the next recursive call. To train our algorithm, we require annotated comparisons of different graphs concerning their MIS size. Annotating the comparisons with the output of our algorithm leads to a self-training process that results in more accurate self-annotation of the comparisons and vice versa. We provide numerical evidence showing the superiority of our method vs prior methods in multiple synthetic and real-world datasets.

This paper explores the use of open generative Large Language Models (LLMs) for annotation tasks in the social sciences. The study highlights the challenges associated with proprietary models, such as limited reproducibility and privacy concerns, and advocates for the adoption of open (source) models that can be operated on independent devices. Two examples of annotation tasks, sentiment analysis in tweets and identification of leisure activities in childhood aspirational essays are provided. The study evaluates the performance of different prompting strategies and models (neural-chat-7b-v3-2, Starling-LM-7B-alpha, openchat_3.5, zephyr-7b-alpha and zephyr-7b-beta). The results indicate the need for careful validation and tailored prompt engineering. The study highlights the advantages of open models for data privacy and reproducibility.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) datasets are crucial for various downstream tasks. However, GUI datasets often generate annotation information through automatic labeling, which commonly results in inaccurate GUI element BBox annotations, including missing, duplicate, or meaningless BBoxes. These issues can degrade the performance of models trained on these datasets, limiting their effectiveness in real-world applications. Additionally, existing GUI datasets only provide BBox annotations visually, which restricts the development of visually related GUI downstream tasks. To address these issues, we introduce PixelWeb, a large-scale GUI dataset containing over 100,000 annotated web pages. PixelWeb is constructed using a novel automatic annotation approach that integrates visual feature extraction and Document Object Model (DOM) structure analysis through two core modules: channel derivation and layer analysis. Channel derivation ensures accurate localization of GUI elements in cases of occlusion and overlapping elements by extracting BGRA four-channel bitmap annotations. Layer analysis uses the DOM to determine the visibility and stacking order of elements, providing precise BBox annotations. Additionally, PixelWeb includes comprehensive metadata such as element images, contours, and mask annotations. Manual verification by three independent annotators confirms the high quality and accuracy of PixelWeb annotations. Experimental results on GUI element detection tasks show that PixelWeb achieves performance on the mAP95 metric that is 3-7 times better than existing datasets. We believe that PixelWeb has great potential for performance improvement in downstream tasks such as GUI generation and automated user interaction.

The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. This paper presents the expansions and improvements made on several fronts over the last couple of years (since McCarthy et al. (2020)). Collaborative efforts by numerous linguists have added 67 new languages, including 30 endangered languages. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline to tackle some issues, e.g. missing gender and macron information. We have also amended the schema to use a hierarchical structure that is needed for morphological phenomena like multiple-argument agreement and case stacking, while adding some missing morphological features to make the schema more inclusive. In light of the last UniMorph release, we also augmented the database with morpheme segmentation for 16 languages. Lastly, this new release makes a push towards inclusion of derivational morphology in UniMorph by enriching the data and annotation schema with instances representing derivational processes from MorphyNet.

Privacy policies are supposed to provide notice. But what if substantive information appears only where users skip it? We identify a structural pattern we call jurisdiction-siloed disclosure: information about data practices appearing in specific, actionable form only within regional compliance sections labeled "California Residents" or "EU/UK Users," while general sections use vague or qualified language for the same practices. Our audit of 123 major companies identifies 282 potential instances across 77 companies (62.6% of this purposive sample). A conservative estimate restricted to practice categories validated against OPP-115 human annotations finds 138 instances across 54 companies (44%); post-2018 categories central to our findings await independent validation. If users skip jurisdiction-labeled sections as information foraging theory predicts, users outside regulated jurisdictions would receive less specific information about practices affecting them--a transparency failure operating through document architecture rather than omission. We propose universal substantive disclosure: practices affecting all users should appear in the main policy body, with regional sections containing only procedural rights information. This standard finds support in analogous disclosure regimes (securities, truth-in-lending, nutritional labeling) where material information must reach all affected parties. Regulators could operationalize this through the FTC's "clear and conspicuous" standard and GDPR transparency principles. This work is hypothesis-generating: we establish that the structural pattern exists and ground the transparency concern in behavioral theory, but direct measurement of jurisdiction-specific section skipping remains the critical validation priority. We release our methodology and annotated dataset to enable replication.

Galaxy Zoo: Clump Scout is a web-based citizen science project designed to identify and spatially locate giant star forming clumps in galaxies that were imaged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Legacy Survey. We present a statistically driven software framework that is designed to aggregate two-dimensional annotations of clump locations provided by multiple independent Galaxy Zoo: Clump Scout volunteers and generate a consensus label that identifies the locations of probable clumps within each galaxy. The statistical model our framework is based on allows us to assign false-positive probabilities to each of the clumps we identify, to estimate the skill levels of each of the volunteers who contribute to Galaxy Zoo: Clump Scout and also to quantitatively assess the reliability of the consensus labels that are derived for each subject. We apply our framework to a dataset containing 3,561,454 two-dimensional points, which constitute 1,739,259 annotations of 85,286 distinct subjects provided by 20,999 volunteers. Using this dataset, we identify 128,100 potential clumps distributed among 44,126 galaxies. This dataset can be used to study the prevalence and demographics of giant star forming clumps in low-redshift galaxies. The code for our aggregation software framework is publicly available at: https://github.com/ou-astrophysics/BoxAggregator

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a fundamental tool for assisting clinicians in analyzing ophthalmic images, such as optical coherence tomography (OCT). However, developing AI models often requires extensive annotation, and existing models tend to underperform on independent, unseen data. Foundation models (FMs), large AI models trained on vast unlabeled datasets, have shown promise in overcoming these challenges. Nonetheless, available FMs for ophthalmology lack extensive validation, especially for segmentation tasks, and focus on a single imaging modality. In this context, we propose MIRAGE, a novel multimodal FM for the analysis of OCT and scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO) images. Additionally, we propose a new evaluation benchmark with OCT/SLO classification and segmentation tasks. The comparison with general and specialized FMs and segmentation methods shows the superiority of MIRAGE in both types of tasks, highlighting its suitability as a basis for the development of robust AI systems for retinal OCT image analysis. Both MIRAGE and the evaluation benchmark are publicly available: https://github.com/j-morano/MIRAGE.

Protein Language Models (PLMs) have emerged as performant and scalable tools for predicting the functional impact and clinical significance of protein-coding variants, but they still lag experimental accuracy. Here, we present a novel fine-tuning approach to improve the performance of PLMs with experimental maps of variant effects from Deep Mutational Scanning (DMS) assays using a Normalised Log-odds Ratio (NLR) head. We find consistent improvements in a held-out protein test set, and on independent DMS and clinical variant annotation benchmarks from ProteinGym and ClinVar. These findings demonstrate that DMS is a promising source of sequence diversity and supervised training data for improving the performance of PLMs for variant effect prediction.

Extracting structured clinical information from free-text radiology reports can enable the use of radiology report information for a variety of critical healthcare applications. In our work, we present RadGraph, a dataset of entities and relations in full-text chest X-ray radiology reports based on a novel information extraction schema we designed to structure radiology reports. We release a development dataset, which contains board-certified radiologist annotations for 500 radiology reports from the MIMIC-CXR dataset (14,579 entities and 10,889 relations), and a test dataset, which contains two independent sets of board-certified radiologist annotations for 100 radiology reports split equally across the MIMIC-CXR and CheXpert datasets. Using these datasets, we train and test a deep learning model, RadGraph Benchmark, that achieves a micro F1 of 0.82 and 0.73 on relation extraction on the MIMIC-CXR and CheXpert test sets respectively. Additionally, we release an inference dataset, which contains annotations automatically generated by RadGraph Benchmark across 220,763 MIMIC-CXR reports (around 6 million entities and 4 million relations) and 500 CheXpert reports (13,783 entities and 9,908 relations) with mappings to associated chest radiographs. Our freely available dataset can facilitate a wide range of research in medical natural language processing, as well as computer vision and multi-modal learning when linked to chest radiographs.

Self-supervised models have revolutionized speech processing, achieving new levels of performance in a wide variety of tasks with limited resources. However, the inner workings of these models are still opaque. In this paper, we aim to analyze the encoded contextual representation of these foundation models based on their inter- and intra-model similarity, independent of any external annotation and task-specific constraint. We examine different SSL models varying their training paradigm -- Contrastive (Wav2Vec2.0) and Predictive models (HuBERT); and model sizes (base and large). We explore these models on different levels of localization/distributivity of information including (i) individual neurons; (ii) layer representation; (iii) attention weights and (iv) compare the representations with their finetuned counterparts.Our results highlight that these models converge to similar representation subspaces but not to similar neuron-localized concepts\footnote{A concept represents a coherent fragment of knowledge, such as ``a class containing certain objects as elements, where the objects have certain properties. We made the code publicly available for facilitating further research, we publicly released our code.

In the last decade, zero-cost metrics have gained prominence in neural architecture search (NAS) due to their ability to evaluate architectures without training. These metrics are significantly faster and less computationally expensive than traditional NAS methods and provide insights into neural architectures' internal workings. This paper introduces epsinas, a novel zero-cost NAS metric that assesses architecture potential using two constant shared weight initialisations and the statistics of their outputs. We show that the dispersion of raw outputs, normalised by their average magnitude, strongly correlates with trained accuracy. This effect holds across image classification and language tasks on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, and NAS-Bench-NLP. Our method requires no data labels, operates on a single minibatch, and eliminates the need for gradient computation, making it independent of training hyperparameters, loss metrics, and human annotations. It evaluates a network in a fraction of a GPU second and integrates seamlessly into existing NAS frameworks. The code supporting this study can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/egracheva/epsinas.

The rapid progress of photorealistic synthesis techniques has reached at a critical point where the boundary between real and manipulated images starts to blur. Thus, benchmarking and advancing digital forgery analysis have become a pressing issue. However, existing face forgery datasets either have limited diversity or only support coarse-grained analysis. To counter this emerging threat, we construct the ForgeryNet dataset, an extremely large face forgery dataset with unified annotations in image- and video-level data across four tasks: 1) Image Forgery Classification, including two-way (real / fake), three-way (real / fake with identity-replaced forgery approaches / fake with identity-remained forgery approaches), and n-way (real and 15 respective forgery approaches) classification. 2) Spatial Forgery Localization, which segments the manipulated area of fake images compared to their corresponding source real images. 3) Video Forgery Classification, which re-defines the video-level forgery classification with manipulated frames in random positions. This task is important because attackers in real world are free to manipulate any target frame. and 4) Temporal Forgery Localization, to localize the temporal segments which are manipulated. ForgeryNet is by far the largest publicly available deep face forgery dataset in terms of data-scale (2.9 million images, 221,247 videos), manipulations (7 image-level approaches, 8 video-level approaches), perturbations (36 independent and more mixed perturbations) and annotations (6.3 million classification labels, 2.9 million manipulated area annotations and 221,247 temporal forgery segment labels). We perform extensive benchmarking and studies of existing face forensics methods and obtain several valuable observations.

Data annotation is an essential step for constructing new datasets. However, the conventional approach of data annotation through crowdsourcing is both time-consuming and expensive. In addition, the complexity of this process increases when dealing with low-resource languages owing to the difference in the language pool of crowdworkers. To address these issues, this study proposes an autonomous annotation method by utilizing large language models, which have been recently demonstrated to exhibit remarkable performance. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method is not just cost-efficient but also applicable for low-resource language annotation. Additionally, we constructed an image captioning dataset using our approach and are committed to open this dataset for future study. We have opened our source code for further study and reproducibility.

Many recent approaches to natural language tasks are built on the remarkable abilities of large language models. Large language models can perform in-context learning, where they learn a new task from a few task demonstrations, without any parameter updates. This work examines the implications of in-context learning for the creation of datasets for new natural language tasks. Departing from recent in-context learning methods, we formulate an annotation-efficient, two-step framework: selective annotation that chooses a pool of examples to annotate from unlabeled data in advance, followed by prompt retrieval that retrieves task examples from the annotated pool at test time. Based on this framework, we propose an unsupervised, graph-based selective annotation method, voke-k, to select diverse, representative examples to annotate. Extensive experiments on 10 datasets (covering classification, commonsense reasoning, dialogue, and text/code generation) demonstrate that our selective annotation method improves the task performance by a large margin. On average, vote-k achieves a 12.9%/11.4% relative gain under an annotation budget of 18/100, as compared to randomly selecting examples to annotate. Compared to state-of-the-art supervised finetuning approaches, it yields similar performance with 10-100x less annotation cost across 10 tasks. We further analyze the effectiveness of our framework in various scenarios: language models with varying sizes, alternative selective annotation methods, and cases where there is a test data domain shift. We hope that our studies will serve as a basis for data annotations as large language models are increasingly applied to new tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUNLP/icl-selective-annotation.

The task of annotating data into concise summaries poses a significant challenge across various domains, frequently requiring the allocation of significant time and specialized knowledge by human experts. Despite existing efforts to use large language models for annotation tasks, significant problems such as limited applicability to unlabeled data, the absence of self-supervised methods, and the lack of focus on complex structured data still persist. In this work, we propose a GPT self-supervision annotation method, which embodies a generating-recovering paradigm that leverages the one-shot learning capabilities of the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT). The proposed approach comprises a one-shot tuning phase followed by a generation phase. In the one-shot tuning phase, we sample a data from the support set as part of the prompt for GPT to generate a textual summary, which is then used to recover the original data. The alignment score between the recovered and original data serves as a self-supervision navigator to refine the process. In the generation stage, the optimally selected one-shot sample serves as a template in the prompt and is applied to generating summaries from challenging datasets. The annotation performance is evaluated by tuning several human feedback reward networks and by calculating alignment scores between original and recovered data at both sentence and structure levels. Our self-supervised annotation method consistently achieves competitive scores, convincingly demonstrating its robust strength in various data-to-summary annotation tasks.

Universal Dependencies is an open community effort to create cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages within a dependency-based lexicalist framework. The annotation consists in a linguistically motivated word segmentation; a morphological layer comprising lemmas, universal part-of-speech tags, and standardized morphological features; and a syntactic layer focusing on syntactic relations between predicates, arguments and modifiers. In this paper, we describe version 2 of the guidelines (UD v2), discuss the major changes from UD v1 to UD v2, and give an overview of the currently available treebanks for 90 languages.

This paper presents NorNE, a manually annotated corpus of named entities which extends the annotation of the existing Norwegian Dependency Treebank. Comprising both of the official standards of written Norwegian (Bokm{\aa}l and Nynorsk), the corpus contains around 600,000 tokens and annotates a rich set of entity types including persons, organizations, locations, geo-political entities, products, and events, in addition to a class corresponding to nominals derived from names. We here present details on the annotation effort, guidelines, inter-annotator agreement and an experimental analysis of the corpus using a neural sequence labeling architecture.

We present a corpus of 5,000 richly annotated abstracts of medical articles describing clinical randomized controlled trials. Annotations include demarcations of text spans that describe the Patient population enrolled, the Interventions studied and to what they were Compared, and the Outcomes measured (the `PICO' elements). These spans are further annotated at a more granular level, e.g., individual interventions within them are marked and mapped onto a structured medical vocabulary. We acquired annotations from a diverse set of workers with varying levels of expertise and cost. We describe our data collection process and the corpus itself in detail. We then outline a set of challenging NLP tasks that would aid searching of the medical literature and the practice of evidence-based medicine.

The introduction of computerized medical records in hospitals has reduced burdensome operations like manual writing and information fetching. However, the data contained in medical records are still far underutilized, primarily because extracting them from unstructured textual medical records takes time and effort. Information Extraction, a subfield of Natural Language Processing, can help clinical practitioners overcome this limitation, using automated text-mining pipelines. In this work, we created the first Italian neuropsychiatric Named Entity Recognition dataset, PsyNIT, and used it to develop a Large Language Model for this task. Moreover, we conducted several experiments with three external independent datasets to implement an effective multicenter model, with overall F1-score 84.77%, Precision 83.16%, Recall 86.44%. The lessons learned are: (i) the crucial role of a consistent annotation process and (ii) a fine-tuning strategy that combines classical methods with a "few-shot" approach. This allowed us to establish methodological guidelines that pave the way for future implementations in this field and allow Italian hospitals to tap into important research opportunities.

We propose an approach for annotating object classes using free-form text written by undirected and untrained annotators. Free-form labeling is natural for annotators, they intuitively provide very specific and exhaustive labels, and no training stage is necessary. We first collect 729 labels on 15k images using 124 different annotators. Then we automatically enrich the structure of these free-form annotations by discovering a natural vocabulary of 4020 classes within them. This vocabulary represents the natural distribution of objects well and is learned directly from data, instead of being an educated guess done before collecting any labels. Hence, the natural vocabulary emerges from a large mass of free-form annotations. To do so, we (i) map the raw input strings to entities in an ontology of physical objects (which gives them an unambiguous meaning); and (ii) leverage inter-annotator co-occurrences, as well as biases and knowledge specific to individual annotators. Finally, we also automatically extract natural vocabularies of reduced size that have high object coverage while remaining specific. These reduced vocabularies represent the natural distribution of objects much better than commonly used predefined vocabularies. Moreover, they feature more uniform sample distribution over classes.

In this paper we address the scarcity of annotated data for NArabizi, a Romanized form of North African Arabic used mostly on social media, which poses challenges for Natural Language Processing (NLP). We introduce an enriched version of NArabizi Treebank (Seddah et al., 2020) with three main contributions: the addition of two novel annotation layers (named entity recognition and offensive language detection) and a re-annotation of the tokenization, morpho-syntactic and syntactic layers that ensure annotation consistency. Our experimental results, using different tokenization schemes, showcase the value of our contributions and highlight the impact of working with non-gold tokenization for NER and dependency parsing. To facilitate future research, we make these annotations publicly available. Our enhanced NArabizi Treebank paves the way for creating sophisticated language models and NLP tools for this under-represented language.

This paper introduces the task of visual named entity discovery in videos without the need for task-specific supervision or task-specific external knowledge sources. Assigning specific names to entities (e.g. faces, scenes, or objects) in video frames is a long-standing challenge. Commonly, this problem is addressed as a supervised learning objective by manually annotating faces with entity labels. To bypass the annotation burden of this setup, several works have investigated the problem by utilizing external knowledge sources such as movie databases. While effective, such approaches do not work when task-specific knowledge sources are not provided and can only be applied to movies and TV series. In this work, we take the problem a step further and propose to discover entities in videos from videos and corresponding captions or subtitles. We introduce a three-stage method where we (i) create bipartite entity-name graphs from frame-caption pairs, (ii) find visual entity agreements, and (iii) refine the entity assignment through entity-level prototype construction. To tackle this new problem, we outline two new benchmarks SC-Friends and SC-BBT based on the Friends and Big Bang Theory TV series. Experiments on the benchmarks demonstrate the ability of our approach to discover which named entity belongs to which face or scene, with an accuracy close to a supervised oracle, just from the multimodal information present in videos. Additionally, our qualitative examples show the potential challenges of self-contained discovery of any visual entity for future work. The code and the data are available on GitHub.

AI models rely on annotated data to learn pattern and perform prediction. Annotation is usually a labor-intensive step that require associating labels ranging from a simple classification label to more complex tasks such as object detection, oriented bounding box estimation, and instance segmentation. Traditional tools often require extensive manual input, limiting scalability for large datasets. To address this, we introduce VisioFirm, an open-source web application designed to streamline image labeling through AI-assisted automation. VisioFirm integrates state-of-the-art foundation models into an interface with a filtering pipeline to reduce human-in-the-loop efforts. This hybrid approach employs CLIP combined with pre-trained detectors like Ultralytics models for common classes and zero-shot models such as Grounding DINO for custom labels, generating initial annotations with low-confidence thresholding to maximize recall. Through this framework, when tested on COCO-type of classes, initial prediction have been proven to be mostly correct though the users can refine these via interactive tools supporting bounding boxes, oriented bounding boxes, and polygons. Additionally, VisioFirm has on-the-fly segmentation powered by Segment Anything accelerated through WebGPU for browser-side efficiency. The tool supports multiple export formats (YOLO, COCO, Pascal VOC, CSV) and operates offline after model caching, enhancing accessibility. VisioFirm demonstrates up to 90\% reduction in manual effort through benchmarks on diverse datasets, while maintaining high annotation accuracy via clustering of connected CLIP-based disambiguate components and IoU-graph for redundant detection suppression. VisioFirm can be accessed from https://github.com/OschAI/VisioFirm{https://github.com/OschAI/VisioFirm}.

In-context learning is a promising paradigm that utilizes in-context examples as prompts for the predictions of large language models. These prompts are crucial for achieving strong performance. However, since the prompts need to be sampled from a large volume of annotated examples, finding the right prompt may result in high annotation costs. To address this challenge, this paper introduces an influence-driven selective annotation method that aims to minimize annotation costs while improving the quality of in-context examples. The essence of our method is to select a pivotal subset from a large-scale unlabeled data pool to annotate for the subsequent sampling of prompts. Specifically, a directed graph is first constructed to represent unlabeled data. Afterward, the influence of candidate unlabeled subsets is quantified with a diffusion process. A simple yet effective greedy algorithm for unlabeled data selection is lastly introduced. It iteratively selects the data if it provides a maximum marginal gain with respect to quantified influence. Compared with previous efforts on selective annotations, our influence-driven method works in an end-to-end manner, avoids an intractable explicit balance between data diversity and representativeness, and enjoys theoretical support. Experiments confirm the superiority of the proposed method on various benchmarks, achieving better performance under lower time consumption during subset selection. The project page is available at https://skzhang1.github.io/IDEAL/.

This paper proposes a novel named entity recognition (NER) technique specifically tailored for the open-source software systems. Our approach aims to address the scarcity of annotated software data by employing a comprehensive two-step distantly supervised annotation process. This process strategically leverages language heuristics, unique lookup tables, external knowledge sources, and an active learning approach. By harnessing these powerful techniques, we not only enhance model performance but also effectively mitigate the limitations associated with cost and the scarcity of expert annotators. It is noteworthy that our framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art LLMs by a substantial margin. We also show the effectiveness of NER in the downstream task of relation extraction.

High-quality data annotation is an essential but laborious and costly aspect of developing machine learning-based software. We explore the inherent tradeoff between annotation accuracy and cost by detecting and removing minority reports -- instances where annotators provide incorrect responses -- that indicate unnecessary redundancy in task assignments. We propose an approach to prune potentially redundant annotation task assignments before they are executed by estimating the likelihood of an annotator disagreeing with the majority vote for a given task. Our approach is informed by an empirical analysis over computer vision datasets annotated by a professional data annotation platform, which reveals that the likelihood of a minority report event is dependent primarily on image ambiguity, worker variability, and worker fatigue. Simulations over these datasets show that we can reduce the number of annotations required by over 60% with a small compromise in label quality, saving approximately 6.6 days-equivalent of labor. Our approach provides annotation service platforms with a method to balance cost and dataset quality. Machine learning practitioners can tailor annotation accuracy levels according to specific application needs, thereby optimizing budget allocation while maintaining the data quality necessary for critical settings like autonomous driving technology.

Document layout analysis is a known problem to the documents research community and has been vastly explored yielding a multitude of solutions ranging from text mining, and recognition to graph-based representation, visual feature extraction, etc. However, most of the existing works have ignored the crucial fact regarding the scarcity of labeled data. With growing internet connectivity to personal life, an enormous amount of documents had been available in the public domain and thus making data annotation a tedious task. We address this challenge using self-supervision and unlike, the few existing self-supervised document segmentation approaches which use text mining and textual labels, we use a complete vision-based approach in pre-training without any ground-truth label or its derivative. Instead, we generate pseudo-layouts from the document images to pre-train an image encoder to learn the document object representation and localization in a self-supervised framework before fine-tuning it with an object detection model. We show that our pipeline sets a new benchmark in this context and performs at par with the existing methods and the supervised counterparts, if not outperforms. The code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/MaitySubhajit/SelfDocSeg

Data annotation is the labeling or tagging of raw data with relevant information, essential for improving the efficacy of machine learning models. The process, however, is labor-intensive and expensive. The emergence of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by GPT-4, presents an unprecedented opportunity to revolutionize and automate the intricate process of data annotation. While existing surveys have extensively covered LLM architecture, training, and general applications, this paper uniquely focuses on their specific utility for data annotation. This survey contributes to three core aspects: LLM-Based Data Annotation, Assessing LLM-generated Annotations, and Learning with LLM-generated annotations. Furthermore, the paper includes an in-depth taxonomy of methodologies employing LLMs for data annotation, a comprehensive review of learning strategies for models incorporating LLM-generated annotations, and a detailed discussion on primary challenges and limitations associated with using LLMs for data annotation. As a key guide, this survey aims to direct researchers and practitioners in exploring the potential of the latest LLMs for data annotation, fostering future advancements in this critical domain. We provide a comprehensive papers list at https://github.com/Zhen-Tan-dmml/LLM4Annotation.git.

We propose a Transformer-based approach for information extraction from digitized handwritten documents. Our approach combines, in a single model, the different steps that were so far performed by separate models: feature extraction, handwriting recognition and named entity recognition. We compare this integrated approach with traditional two-stage methods that perform handwriting recognition before named entity recognition, and present results at different levels: line, paragraph, and page. Our experiments show that attention-based models are especially interesting when applied on full pages, as they do not require any prior segmentation step. Finally, we show that they are able to learn from key-value annotations: a list of important words with their corresponding named entities. We compare our models to state-of-the-art methods on three public databases (IAM, ESPOSALLES, and POPP) and outperform previous performances on all three datasets.

Distant supervision allows obtaining labeled training corpora for low-resource settings where only limited hand-annotated data exists. However, to be used effectively, the distant supervision must be easy to gather. In this work, we present ANEA, a tool to automatically annotate named entities in texts based on entity lists. It spans the whole pipeline from obtaining the lists to analyzing the errors of the distant supervision. A tuning step allows the user to improve the automatic annotation with their linguistic insights without labelling or checking all tokens manually. In six low-resource scenarios, we show that the F1-score can be increased by on average 18 points through distantly supervised data obtained by ANEA.

Process or step-wise supervision has played a crucial role in advancing complex multi-step reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, efficient, high-quality automated process annotation remains a significant challenge. To address this, we introduce Single-Pass Annotation with Reference-Guided Evaluation (SPARE), a novel structured framework that enables single-pass, per-step annotation by aligning each solution step to one or multiple steps in a reference solution, accompanied by explicit reasoning for evaluation. We show that reference-guided step-level evaluation effectively facilitates process supervision on four datasets spanning three domains: mathematical reasoning, multi-hop compositional question answering, and spatial reasoning. We demonstrate that SPARE, when compared to baselines, improves reasoning performance when used for: (1) fine-tuning models in an offline RL setup for inference-time greedy-decoding, and (2) training reward models for ranking/aggregating multiple LLM-generated outputs. Additionally, SPARE achieves competitive performance on challenging mathematical datasets while offering 2.6 times greater efficiency, requiring only 38% of the runtime, compared to tree search-based automatic annotation. The codebase, along with a trained SPARE-PRM model, is publicly released to facilitate further research and reproducibility.

This paper presents a new challenging information extraction task in the domain of materials science. We develop an annotation scheme for marking information on experiments related to solid oxide fuel cells in scientific publications, such as involved materials and measurement conditions. With this paper, we publish our annotation guidelines, as well as our SOFC-Exp corpus consisting of 45 open-access scholarly articles annotated by domain experts. A corpus and an inter-annotator agreement study demonstrate the complexity of the suggested named entity recognition and slot filling tasks as well as high annotation quality. We also present strong neural-network based models for a variety of tasks that can be addressed on the basis of our new data set. On all tasks, using BERT embeddings leads to large performance gains, but with increasing task complexity, adding a recurrent neural network on top seems beneficial. Our models will serve as competitive baselines in future work, and analysis of their performance highlights difficult cases when modeling the data and suggests promising research directions.

In this paper we present KIND, an Italian dataset for Named-entity recognition. It contains more than one million tokens with annotation covering three classes: person, location, and organization. The dataset (around 600K tokens) mostly contains manual gold annotations in three different domains (news, literature, and political discourses) and a semi-automatically annotated part. The multi-domain feature is the main strength of the present work, offering a resource which covers different styles and language uses, as well as the largest Italian NER dataset with manual gold annotations. It represents an important resource for the training of NER systems in Italian. Texts and annotations are freely downloadable from the Github repository.

Solving complex classification tasks using deep neural networks typically requires large amounts of annotated data. However, corresponding class labels are noisy when provided by error-prone annotators, e.g., crowd workers. Training standard deep neural networks leads to subpar performances in such multi-annotator supervised learning settings. We address this issue by presenting a probabilistic training framework named multi-annotator deep learning (MaDL). A ground truth and an annotator performance model are jointly trained in an end-to-end learning approach. The ground truth model learns to predict instances' true class labels, while the annotator performance model infers probabilistic estimates of annotators' performances. A modular network architecture enables us to make varying assumptions regarding annotators' performances, e.g., an optional class or instance dependency. Further, we learn annotator embeddings to estimate annotators' densities within a latent space as proxies of their potentially correlated annotations. Together with a weighted loss function, we improve the learning from correlated annotation patterns. In a comprehensive evaluation, we examine three research questions about multi-annotator supervised learning. Our findings indicate MaDL's state-of-the-art performance and robustness against many correlated, spamming annotators.

We propose a method for the weakly supervised detection of objects in paintings. At training time, only image-level annotations are needed. This, combined with the efficiency of our multiple-instance learning method, enables one to learn new classes on-the-fly from globally annotated databases, avoiding the tedious task of manually marking objects. We show on several databases that dropping the instance-level annotations only yields mild performance losses. We also introduce a new database, IconArt, on which we perform detection experiments on classes that could not be learned on photographs, such as Jesus Child or Saint Sebastian. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first experiments dealing with the automatic (and in our case weakly supervised) detection of iconographic elements in paintings. We believe that such a method is of great benefit for helping art historians to explore large digital databases.

Named entity recognition is a fundamental task in natural language processing, identifying the span and category of entities in unstructured texts. The traditional sequence labeling methodology ignores the nested entities, i.e. entities included in other entity mentions. Many approaches attempt to address this scenario, most of which rely on complex structures or have high computation complexity. The representation learning of the heterogeneous star graph containing text nodes and type nodes is investigated in this paper. In addition, we revise the graph attention mechanism into a hybrid form to address its unreasonableness in specific topologies. The model performs the type-supervised sequence labeling after updating nodes in the graph. The annotation scheme is an extension of the single-layer sequence labeling and is able to cope with the vast majority of nested entities. Extensive experiments on public NER datasets reveal the effectiveness of our model in extracting both flat and nested entities. The method achieved state-of-the-art performance on both flat and nested datasets. The significant improvement in accuracy reflects the superiority of the multi-layer labeling strategy.

In-context learning (ICL), the ability of large language models to perform novel tasks by conditioning on a prompt with a few task examples, requires these examples to be informative about the test instance. The standard approach of independently ranking and selecting the most similar examples selects redundant examples while omitting important information. In this work, we show that BERTScore-Recall (BSR) selects better examples that demonstrate more of the salient aspects, e.g. reasoning patterns, of the test input. We further extend BSR and many standard metrics to easily optimizable set-level metrics, giving still better coverage of those salient aspects. On 15 datasets spanning 6 tasks and with 7 diverse LLMs, we show that (1) BSR is the superior metric for in-context example selection across the board, and (2) for compositional tasks, set selection using Set-BSR outperforms independent ranking by up to 17 points on average and, despite being training-free, surpasses methods that leverage task or LLM-specific training.

Interactive image segmentation enables annotators to efficiently perform pixel-level annotation for segmentation tasks. However, the existing interactive segmentation pipeline suffers from inefficient computations of interactive models because of the following two issues. First, annotators' later click is based on models' feedback of annotators' former click. This serial interaction is unable to utilize model's parallelism capabilities. Second, in each interaction step, the model handles the invariant image along with the sparse variable clicks, resulting in a process that's highly repetitive and redundant. For efficient computations, we propose a method named InterFormer that follows a new pipeline to address these issues. InterFormer extracts and preprocesses the computationally time-consuming part i.e. image processing from the existing process. Specifically, InterFormer employs a large vision transformer (ViT) on high-performance devices to preprocess images in parallel, and then uses a lightweight module called interactive multi-head self attention (I-MSA) for interactive segmentation. Furthermore, the I-MSA module's deployment on low-power devices extends the practical application of interactive segmentation. The I-MSA module utilizes the preprocessed features to efficiently response to the annotator inputs in real-time. The experiments on several datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of InterFormer, which outperforms previous interactive segmentation models in terms of computational efficiency and segmentation quality, achieve real-time high-quality interactive segmentation on CPU-only devices. The code is available at https://github.com/YouHuang67/InterFormer.

Large-scale datasets are essential to modern day deep learning. Advocates argue that understanding these methods requires dataset transparency (e.g. "dataset curation, motivation, composition, collection process, etc..."). However, almost no one has suggested the release of the detailed definitions and visual category examples provided to annotators - information critical to understanding the structure of the annotations present in each dataset. These labels are at the heart of public datasets, yet few datasets include the instructions that were used to generate them. We introduce a new task, Labeling Instruction Generation, to address missing publicly available labeling instructions. In Labeling Instruction Generation, we take a reasonably annotated dataset and: 1) generate a set of examples that are visually representative of each category in the dataset; 2) provide a text label that corresponds to each of the examples. We introduce a framework that requires no model training to solve this task and includes a newly created rapid retrieval system that leverages a large, pre-trained vision and language model. This framework acts as a proxy to human annotators that can help to both generate a final labeling instruction set and evaluate its quality. Our framework generates multiple diverse visual and text representations of dataset categories. The optimized instruction set outperforms our strongest baseline across 5 folds by 7.06 mAP for NuImages and 12.9 mAP for COCO.

High-quality and consistent annotations are fundamental to the successful development of robust machine learning models. Traditional data annotation methods are resource-intensive and inefficient, often leading to a reliance on third-party annotators who are not the domain experts. Hard samples, which are usually the most informative for model training, tend to be difficult to label accurately and consistently without business context. These can arise unpredictably during the annotation process, requiring a variable number of iterations and rounds of feedback, leading to unforeseen expenses and time commitments to guarantee quality. We posit that more direct involvement of domain experts, using a human-in-the-loop system, can resolve many of these practical challenges. We propose a novel framework we call Video Annotator (VA) for annotating, managing, and iterating on video classification datasets. Our approach offers a new paradigm for an end-user-centered model development process, enhancing the efficiency, usability, and effectiveness of video classifiers. Uniquely, VA allows for a continuous annotation process, seamlessly integrating data collection and model training. We leverage the zero-shot capabilities of vision-language foundation models combined with active learning techniques, and demonstrate that VA enables the efficient creation of high-quality models. VA achieves a median 6.8 point improvement in Average Precision relative to the most competitive baseline across a wide-ranging assortment of tasks. We release a dataset with 153k labels across 56 video understanding tasks annotated by three professional video editors using VA, and also release code to replicate our experiments at: http://github.com/netflix/videoannotator.

The increasing diversity of languages used on the web introduces a new level of complexity to Information Retrieval (IR) systems. We can no longer assume that textual content is written in one language or even the same language family. In this paper, we demonstrate how to build massive multilingual annotators with minimal human expertise and intervention. We describe a system that builds Named Entity Recognition (NER) annotators for 40 major languages using Wikipedia and Freebase. Our approach does not require NER human annotated datasets or language specific resources like treebanks, parallel corpora, and orthographic rules. The novelty of approach lies therein - using only language agnostic techniques, while achieving competitive performance. Our method learns distributed word representations (word embeddings) which encode semantic and syntactic features of words in each language. Then, we automatically generate datasets from Wikipedia link structure and Freebase attributes. Finally, we apply two preprocessing stages (oversampling and exact surface form matching) which do not require any linguistic expertise. Our evaluation is two fold: First, we demonstrate the system performance on human annotated datasets. Second, for languages where no gold-standard benchmarks are available, we propose a new method, distant evaluation, based on statistical machine translation.

We present the Recognize Anything Model (RAM): a strong foundation model for image tagging. RAM can recognize any common category with high accuracy. RAM introduces a new paradigm for image tagging, leveraging large-scale image-text pairs for training instead of manual annotations. The development of RAM comprises four key steps. Firstly, annotation-free image tags are obtained at scale through automatic text semantic parsing. Subsequently, a preliminary model is trained for automatic annotation by unifying the caption and tagging tasks, supervised by the original texts and parsed tags, respectively. Thirdly, a data engine is employed to generate additional annotations and clean incorrect ones. Lastly, the model is retrained with the processed data and fine-tuned using a smaller but higher-quality dataset. We evaluate the tagging capabilities of RAM on numerous benchmarks and observe impressive zero-shot performance, significantly outperforming CLIP and BLIP. Remarkably, RAM even surpasses the fully supervised manners and exhibits competitive performance with the Google API. We are releasing the RAM at https://recognize-anything.github.io/ to foster the advancements of large models in computer vision.

The process of annotating data within the legal sector is filled with distinct challenges that differ from other fields, primarily due to the inherent complexities of legal language and documentation. The initial task usually involves selecting an appropriate raw dataset that captures the intricate aspects of legal texts. Following this, extracting text becomes a complicated task, as legal documents often have complex structures, footnotes, references, and unique terminology. The importance of data cleaning is magnified in this context, ensuring that redundant information is eliminated while maintaining crucial legal details and context. Creating comprehensive yet straightforward annotation guidelines is imperative, as these guidelines serve as the road map for maintaining uniformity and addressing the subtle nuances of legal terminology. Another critical aspect is the involvement of legal professionals in the annotation process. Their expertise is valuable in ensuring that the data not only remains contextually accurate but also adheres to prevailing legal standards and interpretations. This paper provides an expanded view of these challenges and aims to offer a foundational understanding and guidance for researchers and professionals engaged in legal data annotation projects. In addition, we provide links to our created and fine-tuned datasets and language models. These resources are outcomes of our discussed projects and solutions to challenges faced while working on them.

The Open Images Dataset contains approximately 9 million images and is a widely accepted dataset for computer vision research. As is common practice for large datasets, the annotations are not exhaustive, with bounding boxes and attribute labels for only a subset of the classes in each image. In this paper, we present a new set of annotations on a subset of the Open Images dataset called the MIAP (More Inclusive Annotations for People) subset, containing bounding boxes and attributes for all of the people visible in those images. The attributes and labeling methodology for the MIAP subset were designed to enable research into model fairness. In addition, we analyze the original annotation methodology for the person class and its subclasses, discussing the resulting patterns in order to inform future annotation efforts. By considering both the original and exhaustive annotation sets, researchers can also now study how systematic patterns in training annotations affect modeling.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential for data annotation, markedly reducing the labor costs associated with downstream applications. However, existing methods mostly adopt an aggressive strategy by prompting LLM to determine a single gold label for each unlabeled sample. Due to the inherent uncertainty within LLMs, they often produce incorrect labels for difficult samples, severely compromising the data quality for downstream applications. Motivated by ambiguity aversion in human behaviors, we propose a novel candidate annotation paradigm wherein large language models are encouraged to output all possible labels when incurring uncertainty. To ensure unique labels are provided for downstream tasks, we develop a teacher-student framework CanDist that distills candidate annotations with a Small Language Model (SLM). We further provide a rigorous justification demonstrating that distilling candidate annotations from the teacher LLM offers superior theoretical guarantees compared to directly using single annotations. Extensive experiments across six text classification tasks validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The source code is available at https://github.com/MingxuanXia/CanDist.

Colonial archives are at the center of increased interest from a variety of perspectives, as they contain traces of historically marginalized people. Unfortunately, like most archives, they remain difficult to access due to significant persisting barriers. We focus here on one of them: the biases to be found in historical findings aids, such as indexes of person names, which remain in use to this day. In colonial archives, indexes can perpetuate silences by omitting to include mentions of historically marginalized persons. In order to overcome such limitations and pluralize the scope of existing finding aids, we propose using automated entity recognition. To this end, we contribute a fit-for-purpose annotation typology and apply it on the colonial archive of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). We release a corpus of nearly 70,000 annotations as a shared task, for which we provide baselines using state-of-the-art neural network models. Our work intends to stimulate further contributions in the direction of broadening access to (colonial) archives, integrating automation as a possible means to this end.

In NLP, fine-tuning LLMs is effective for various applications but requires high-quality annotated data. However, manual annotation of data is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly. Therefore, LLMs are increasingly used to automate the process, often employing in-context learning (ICL) in which some examples related to the task are given in the prompt for better performance. However, manually selecting context examples can lead to inefficiencies and suboptimal model performance. This paper presents comprehensive experiments comparing several LLMs, considering different embedding models, across various datasets for the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task. The evaluation encompasses models with approximately 7B and 70B parameters, including both proprietary and non-proprietary models. Furthermore, leveraging the success of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), it also considers a method that addresses the limitations of ICL by automatically retrieving contextual examples, thereby enhancing performance. The results highlight the importance of selecting the appropriate LLM and embedding model, understanding the trade-offs between LLM sizes and desired performance, and the necessity to direct research efforts towards more challenging datasets.

We present SAINE, an Scientific Annotation and Inference ENgine based on a set of standard open-source software, such as Label Studio and MLflow. We show that our annotation engine can benefit the further development of a more accurate classification. Based on our previous work on hierarchical discipline classifications, we demonstrate its application using SAINE in understanding the space for scholarly publications. The user study of our annotation results shows that user input collected with the help of our system can help us better understand the classification process. We believe that our work will help to foster greater transparency and better understand scientific research. Our annotation and inference engine can further support the downstream meta-science projects. We welcome collaboration and feedback from the scientific community on these projects. The demonstration video can be accessed from https://youtu.be/yToO-G9YQK4. A live demo website is available at https://app.heartex.com/user/signup/?token=e2435a2f97449fa1 upon free registration.

Diderot's Encyclop\'edie is a reference work from XVIIIth century in Europe that aimed at collecting the knowledge of its era. Wikipedia has the same ambition with a much greater scope. However, the lack of digital connection between the two encyclopedias may hinder their comparison and the study of how knowledge has evolved. A key element of Wikipedia is Wikidata that backs the articles with a graph of structured data. In this paper, we describe the annotation of more than 10,300 of the Encyclop\'edie entries with Wikidata identifiers enabling us to connect these entries to the graph. We considered geographic and human entities. The Encyclop\'edie does not contain biographic entries as they mostly appear as subentries of locations. We extracted all the geographic entries and we completely annotated all the entries containing a description of human entities. This represents more than 2,600 links referring to locations or human entities. In addition, we annotated more than 9,500 entries having a geographic content only. We describe the annotation process as well as application examples. This resource is available at https://github.com/pnugues/encyclopedie_1751

Extracting key information from scientific papers has the potential to help researchers work more efficiently and accelerate the pace of scientific progress. Over the last few years, research on Scientific Information Extraction (SciIE) witnessed the release of several new systems and benchmarks. However, existing paper-focused datasets mostly focus only on specific parts of a manuscript (e.g., abstracts) and are single-modality (i.e., text- or table-only), due to complex processing and expensive annotations. Moreover, core information can be present in either text or tables or across both. To close this gap in data availability and enable cross-modality IE, while alleviating labeling costs, we propose a semi-supervised pipeline for annotating entities in text, as well as entities and relations in tables, in an iterative procedure. Based on this pipeline, we release novel resources for the scientific community, including a high-quality benchmark, a large-scale corpus, and a semi-supervised annotation pipeline. We further report the performance of state-of-the-art IE models on the proposed benchmark dataset, as a baseline. Lastly, we explore the potential capability of large language models such as ChatGPT for the current task. Our new dataset, results, and analysis validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our semi-supervised pipeline, and we discuss its remaining limitations.

Domain-specific named entity recognition (NER) on Computer Science (CS) scholarly articles is an information extraction task that is arguably more challenging for the various annotation aims that can beset the task and has been less studied than NER in the general domain. Given that significant progress has been made on NER, we believe that scholarly domain-specific NER will receive increasing attention in the years to come. Currently, progress on CS NER -- the focus of this work -- is hampered in part by its recency and the lack of a standardized annotation aim for scientific entities/terms. This work proposes a standardized task by defining a set of seven contribution-centric scholarly entities for CS NER viz., research problem, solution, resource, language, tool, method, and dataset. Following which, its main contributions are: combines existing CS NER resources that maintain their annotation focus on the set or subset of contribution-centric scholarly entities we consider; further, noting the need for big data to train neural NER models, this work additionally supplies thousands of contribution-centric entity annotations from article titles and abstracts, thus releasing a cumulative large novel resource for CS NER; and, finally, trains a sequence labeling CS NER model inspired after state-of-the-art neural architectures from the general domain NER task. Throughout the work, several practical considerations are made which can be useful to information technology designers of the digital libraries.

In large organisations, identifying experts on a given topic is crucial in leveraging the internal knowledge spread across teams and departments. So-called enterprise expert retrieval systems automatically discover and structure employees' expertise based on the vast amount of heterogeneous data available about them and the work they perform. Evaluating these systems requires comprehensive ground truth expert annotations, which are hard to obtain. Therefore, the annotation process typically relies on automated recommendations of knowledge areas to validate. This case study provides an analysis of how these recommendations can impact the evaluation of expert finding systems. We demonstrate on a popular benchmark that system-validated annotations lead to overestimated performance of traditional term-based retrieval models and even invalidate comparisons with more recent neural methods. We also augment knowledge areas with synonyms to uncover a strong bias towards literal mentions of their constituent words. Finally, we propose constraints to the annotation process to prevent these biased evaluations, and show that this still allows annotation suggestions of high utility. These findings should inform benchmark creation or selection for expert finding, to guarantee meaningful comparison of methods.

Instruction fine-tuning stands as a crucial advancement in leveraging large language models (LLMs) for enhanced task performance. However, the annotation of instruction datasets has traditionally been expensive and laborious, often relying on manual annotations or costly API calls of proprietary LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce FANNO, a fully autonomous, open-sourced framework that revolutionizes the annotation process without the need for pre-existing annotated data. Utilizing a Mistral-7b-instruct model, FANNO efficiently produces diverse and high-quality datasets through a structured process involving document pre-screening, instruction generation, and response generation. Experiments on Open LLM Leaderboard and AlpacaEval benchmark show that the FANNO can generate high-quality data with diversity and complexity for free, comparable to human-annotated or cleaned datasets like Alpaca-GPT4-Cleaned.

The application of machine learning to medical ultrasound videos of the heart, i.e., echocardiography, has recently gained traction with the availability of large public datasets. Traditional supervised tasks, such as ejection fraction regression, are now making way for approaches focusing more on the latent structure of data distributions, as well as generative methods. We propose a model trained exclusively by knowledge distillation, either on real or synthetical data, involving retrieving masks suggested by a teacher model. We achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) values on the task of identifying end-diastolic and end-systolic frames. By training the model only on synthetic data, it reaches segmentation capabilities close to the performance when trained on real data with a significantly reduced number of weights. A comparison with the 5 main existing methods shows that our method outperforms the others in most cases. We also present a new evaluation method that does not require human annotation and instead relies on a large auxiliary model. We show that this method produces scores consistent with those obtained from human annotations. Relying on the integrated knowledge from a vast amount of records, this method overcomes certain inherent limitations of human annotator labeling. Code: https://github.com/GregoirePetit/EchoDFKD

Retrieval models are often evaluated on partially-annotated datasets. Each query is mapped to a few relevant texts and the remaining corpus is assumed to be irrelevant. As a result, models that successfully retrieve false negatives are punished in evaluation. Unfortunately, completely annotating all texts for every query is not resource efficient. In this work, we show that using partially-annotated datasets in evaluation can paint a distorted picture. We curate D-MERIT, a passage retrieval evaluation set from Wikipedia, aspiring to contain all relevant passages for each query. Queries describe a group (e.g., ``journals about linguistics'') and relevant passages are evidence that entities belong to the group (e.g., a passage indicating that Language is a journal about linguistics). We show that evaluating on a dataset containing annotations for only a subset of the relevant passages might result in misleading ranking of the retrieval systems and that as more relevant texts are included in the evaluation set, the rankings converge. We propose our dataset as a resource for evaluation and our study as a recommendation for balance between resource-efficiency and reliable evaluation when annotating evaluation sets for text retrieval.

This paper presents the formal release of MedMentions, a new manually annotated resource for the recognition of biomedical concepts. What distinguishes MedMentions from other annotated biomedical corpora is its size (over 4,000 abstracts and over 350,000 linked mentions), as well as the size of the concept ontology (over 3 million concepts from UMLS 2017) and its broad coverage of biomedical disciplines. In addition to the full corpus, a sub-corpus of MedMentions is also presented, comprising annotations for a subset of UMLS 2017 targeted towards document retrieval. To encourage research in Biomedical Named Entity Recognition and Linking, data splits for training and testing are included in the release, and a baseline model and its metrics for entity linking are also described.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in handling complex queries, much of the past work has depended on extensively annotated datasets by human experts. However, this reliance on fully-supervised annotations poses scalability challenges, particularly as models and data requirements grow. To mitigate this, we explore the potential of enhancing LLMs' reasoning abilities with minimal human supervision. In this work, we introduce self-reinforcement, which begins with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) of the model using a small collection of annotated questions. Then it iteratively improves LLMs by learning from the differences in responses from the SFT and unfinetuned models on unlabeled questions. Our approach provides an efficient approach without relying heavily on extensive human-annotated explanations. However, current reasoning benchmarks typically only include golden-reference answers or rationales. Therefore, we present PuzzleBen, a weakly supervised benchmark that comprises 25,147 complex questions, answers, and human-generated rationales across various domains, such as brainteasers, puzzles, riddles, parajumbles, and critical reasoning tasks. A unique aspect of our dataset is the inclusion of 10,000 unannotated questions, enabling us to explore utilizing fewer supersized data to boost LLMs' inference capabilities. Our experiments underscore the significance of PuzzleBen, as well as the effectiveness of our methodology as a promising direction in future endeavors. Our dataset and code will be published soon on Anonymity Link.

News headline generation is a crucial task in increasing productivity for both the readers and producers of news. This task can easily be aided by automated News headline-generation models. However, the presence of irrelevant headlines in scraped news articles results in sub-optimal performance of generation models. We propose that relevance-based headline classification can greatly aid the task of generating relevant headlines. Relevance-based headline classification involves categorizing news headlines based on their relevance to the corresponding news articles. While this task is well-established in English, it remains under-explored in low-resource languages like Telugu due to a lack of annotated data. To address this gap, we present TeClass, the first-ever human-annotated Telugu news headline classification dataset, containing 78,534 annotations across 26,178 article-headline pairs. We experiment with various baseline models and provide a comprehensive analysis of their results. We further demonstrate the impact of this work by fine-tuning various headline generation models using TeClass dataset. The headlines generated by the models fine-tuned on highly relevant article-headline pairs, showed about a 5 point increment in the ROUGE-L scores. To encourage future research, the annotated dataset as well as the annotation guidelines will be made publicly available.

Since FineWeb-Edu, data curation for LLM pretraining has predominantly relied on single scalar quality scores produced by small classifiers. A single score conflates multiple quality dimensions, prevents flexible filtering, and offers no interpretability. We introduce propella-1, a family of small multilingual LLMs (0.6B, 1.7B, 4B parameters) that annotate text documents across 18 properties organized into six categories: core content, classification, quality and value, audience and purpose, safety and compliance, and geographic relevance. The models support 57 languages and produce structured JSON annotations conforming to a predefined schema. Evaluated against a frontier commercial LLM as a reference annotator, the 4B model achieves higher agreement than much larger general-purpose models. We release propella-annotations, a dataset of over three billion document annotations covering major pretraining corpora including data from FineWeb-2, FinePDFs, HPLT 3.0, and Nemotron-CC. Using these annotations, we present a multi-dimensional compositional analysis of widely used pretraining datasets, revealing substantial differences in quality, reasoning depth, and content composition that single-score approaches cannot capture. All model weights and annotations are released under permissive, commercial-use licenses.

We introduce S2ORC, a large corpus of 81.1M English-language academic papers spanning many academic disciplines. The corpus consists of rich metadata, paper abstracts, resolved bibliographic references, as well as structured full text for 8.1M open access papers. Full text is annotated with automatically-detected inline mentions of citations, figures, and tables, each linked to their corresponding paper objects. In S2ORC, we aggregate papers from hundreds of academic publishers and digital archives into a unified source, and create the largest publicly-available collection of machine-readable academic text to date. We hope this resource will facilitate research and development of tools and tasks for text mining over academic text.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in constructing passage retrieval datasets. However, existing methods still face limitations in expressing cross-doc query needs and controlling annotation quality. To address these issues, this paper proposes a bidirectional generation pipeline, which aims to generate 3-level hierarchical queries for both intra-doc and cross-doc scenarios and mine additional relevance labels on top of direct mapping annotation. The pipeline introduces two query generation methods: bottom-up from single-doc text and top-down from multi-doc titles. The bottom-up method uses LLMs to disassemble and generate structured queries at both sentence-level and passage-level simultaneously from intra-doc passages. The top-down approach incorporates three key financial elements--industry, topic, and time--to divide report titles into clusters and prompts LLMs to generate topic-level queries from each cluster. For relevance annotation, our pipeline not only relies on direct mapping annotation from the generation relationship but also implements an indirect positives mining method to enrich the relevant query-passage pairs. Using this pipeline, we constructed a Financial Passage Retrieval Generated dataset (FinCPRG) from almost 1.3k Chinese financial research reports, which includes hierarchical queries and rich relevance labels. Through evaluations of mined relevance labels, benchmarking and training experiments, we assessed the quality of FinCPRG and validated its effectiveness as a passage retrieval dataset for both training and benchmarking.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a key information extraction task with a long-standing tradition. While recent studies address and aim to correct annotation errors via re-labeling efforts, little is known about the sources of human label variation, such as text ambiguity, annotation error, or guideline divergence. This is especially the case for high-quality datasets and beyond English CoNLL03. This paper studies disagreements in expert-annotated named entity datasets for three languages: English, Danish, and Bavarian. We show that text ambiguity and artificial guideline changes are dominant factors for diverse annotations among high-quality revisions. We survey student annotations on a subset of difficult entities and substantiate the feasibility and necessity of manifold annotations for understanding named entity ambiguities from a distributional perspective.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a foundational NLP task that aims to provide class labels like Person, Location, Organisation, Time, and Number to words in free text. Named Entities can also be multi-word expressions where the additional I-O-B annotation information helps label them during the NER annotation process. While English and European languages have considerable annotated data for the NER task, Indian languages lack on that front -- both in terms of quantity and following annotation standards. This paper releases a significantly sized standard-abiding Hindi NER dataset containing 109,146 sentences and 2,220,856 tokens, annotated with 11 tags. We discuss the dataset statistics in all their essential detail and provide an in-depth analysis of the NER tag-set used with our data. The statistics of tag-set in our dataset show a healthy per-tag distribution, especially for prominent classes like Person, Location and Organisation. Since the proof of resource-effectiveness is in building models with the resource and testing the model on benchmark data and against the leader-board entries in shared tasks, we do the same with the aforesaid data. We use different language models to perform the sequence labelling task for NER and show the efficacy of our data by performing a comparative evaluation with models trained on another dataset available for the Hindi NER task. Our dataset helps achieve a weighted F1 score of 88.78 with all the tags and 92.22 when we collapse the tag-set, as discussed in the paper. To the best of our knowledge, no available dataset meets the standards of volume (amount) and variability (diversity), as far as Hindi NER is concerned. We fill this gap through this work, which we hope will significantly help NLP for Hindi. We release this dataset with our code and models at https://github.com/cfiltnlp/HiNER

We introduce FindingEmo, a new image dataset containing annotations for 25k images, specifically tailored to Emotion Recognition. Contrary to existing datasets, it focuses on complex scenes depicting multiple people in various naturalistic, social settings, with images being annotated as a whole, thereby going beyond the traditional focus on faces or single individuals. Annotated dimensions include Valence, Arousal and Emotion label, with annotations gathered using Prolific. Together with the annotations, we release the list of URLs pointing to the original images, as well as all associated source code.

The development of state-of-the-art (SOTA) Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems has steadily been establishing new techniques to absorb the statistics of linguistic data. These techniques often trace well-known constructs from traditional theories, and we study these connections to close gaps around key NLP methods as a means to orient future work. For this, we introduce an analytic model of the statistics learned by seminal algorithms (including GloVe and Word2Vec), and derive insights for systems that use these algorithms and the statistics of co-occurrence, in general. In this work, we derive -- to the best of our knowledge -- the first known solution to Word2Vec's softmax-optimized, skip-gram algorithm. This result presents exciting potential for future development as a direct solution to a deep learning (DL) language model's (LM's) matrix factorization. However, we use the solution to demonstrate a seemingly-universal existence of a property that word vectors exhibit and which allows for the prophylactic discernment of biases in data -- prior to their absorption by DL models. To qualify our work, we conduct an analysis of independence, i.e., on the density of statistical dependencies in co-occurrence models, which in turn renders insights on the distributional hypothesis' partial fulfillment by co-occurrence statistics.

Today, most large-scale conversational AI agents (e.g. Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant) are built using manually annotated data to train the different components of the system. Typically, the accuracy of the ML models in these components are improved by manually transcribing and annotating data. As the scope of these systems increase to cover more scenarios and domains, manual annotation to improve the accuracy of these components becomes prohibitively costly and time consuming. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages user-system interaction feedback signals to automate learning without any manual annotation. Users here tend to modify a previous query in hopes of fixing an error in the previous turn to get the right results. These reformulations, which are often preceded by defective experiences caused by errors in ASR, NLU, ER or the application. In some cases, users may not properly formulate their requests (e.g. providing partial title of a song), but gleaning across a wider pool of users and sessions reveals the underlying recurrent patterns. Our proposed self-learning system automatically detects the errors, generate reformulations and deploys fixes to the runtime system to correct different types of errors occurring in different components of the system. In particular, we propose leveraging an absorbing Markov Chain model as a collaborative filtering mechanism in a novel attempt to mine these patterns. We show that our approach is highly scalable, and able to learn reformulations that reduce Alexa-user errors by pooling anonymized data across millions of customers. The proposed self-learning system achieves a win/loss ratio of 11.8 and effectively reduces the defect rate by more than 30% on utterance level reformulations in our production A/B tests. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first self-learning large-scale conversational AI system in production.

Though pre-training vision-language models have demonstrated significant benefits in boosting video-text retrieval performance from large-scale web videos, fine-tuning still plays a critical role with manually annotated clips with start and end times, which requires considerable human effort. To address this issue, we explore an alternative cheaper source of annotations, single timestamps, for video-text retrieval. We initialise clips from timestamps in a heuristic way to warm up a retrieval model. Then a video clip editing method is proposed to refine the initial rough boundaries to improve retrieval performance. A student-teacher network is introduced for video clip editing. The teacher model is employed to edit the clips in the training set whereas the student model trains on the edited clips. The teacher weights are updated from the student's after the student's performance increases. Our method is model agnostic and applicable to any retrieval models. We conduct experiments based on three state-of-the-art retrieval models, COOT, VideoCLIP and CLIP4Clip. Experiments conducted on three video retrieval datasets, YouCook2, DiDeMo and ActivityNet-Captions show that our edited clips consistently improve retrieval performance over initial clips across all the three retrieval models.

The NLP community has long advocated for the construction of multi-annotator datasets to better capture the nuances of language interpretation, subjectivity, and ambiguity. This paper conducts a retrospective study to show how performance scores can vary when a dataset expands from a single annotation per instance to multiple annotations. We propose a novel multi-annotator simulation process to generate datasets with varying annotation budgets. We show that similar datasets with the same annotation budget can lead to varying performance gains. Our findings challenge the popular belief that models trained on multi-annotation examples always lead to better performance than models trained on single or few-annotation examples.

Textual health records of cancer patients are usually protracted and highly unstructured, making it very time-consuming for health professionals to get a complete overview of the patient's therapeutic course. As such limitations can lead to suboptimal and/or inefficient treatment procedures, healthcare providers would greatly benefit from a system that effectively summarizes the information of those records. With the advent of deep neural models, this objective has been partially attained for English clinical texts, however, the research community still lacks an effective solution for languages with limited resources. In this paper, we present the approach we developed to extract procedures, drugs, and diseases from oncology health records written in European Portuguese. This project was conducted in collaboration with the Portuguese Institute for Oncology which, besides holding over 10 years of duly protected medical records, also provided oncologist expertise throughout the development of the project. Since there is no annotated corpus for biomedical entity extraction in Portuguese, we also present the strategy we followed in annotating the corpus for the development of the models. The final models, which combined a neural architecture with entity linking, achieved F_1 scores of 88.6, 95.0, and 55.8 per cent in the mention extraction of procedures, drugs, and diseases, respectively.

Foundation models, pre-trained on a large amount of data have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities in various downstream tasks. However, in object detection and instance segmentation, two fundamental computer vision tasks heavily reliant on extensive human annotations, foundation models such as SAM and DINO struggle to achieve satisfactory performance. In this study, we reveal that the devil is in the object boundary, i.e., these foundation models fail to discern boundaries between individual objects. For the first time, we probe that CLIP, which has never accessed any instance-level annotations, can provide a highly beneficial and strong instance-level boundary prior in the clustering results of its particular intermediate layer. Following this surprising observation, we propose Zip which Zips up CLip and SAM in a novel classification-first-then-discovery pipeline, enabling annotation-free, complex-scene-capable, open-vocabulary object detection and instance segmentation. Our Zip significantly boosts SAM's mask AP on COCO dataset by 12.5% and establishes state-of-the-art performance in various settings, including training-free, self-training, and label-efficient finetuning. Furthermore, annotation-free Zip even achieves comparable performance to the best-performing open-vocabulary object detecters using base annotations. Code is released at https://github.com/ChengShiest/Zip-Your-CLIP

Many natural language processing (NLP) tasks rely on labeled data to train machine learning models to achieve high performance. However, data annotation can be a time-consuming and expensive process, especially when the task involves a large amount of data or requires specialized domains. Recently, GPT-3.5 series models have demonstrated remarkable few-shot and zero-shot ability across various NLP tasks. In this paper, we first claim that large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5, can serve as an excellent crowdsourced annotator by providing them with sufficient guidance and demonstrated examples. To make LLMs to be better annotators, we propose a two-step approach, 'explain-then-annotate'. To be more precise, we begin by creating prompts for every demonstrated example, which we subsequently utilize to prompt a LLM to provide an explanation for why the specific ground truth answer/label was chosen for that particular example. Following this, we construct the few-shot chain-of-thought prompt with the self-generated explanation and employ it to annotate the unlabeled data. We conduct experiments on three tasks, including user input and keyword relevance assessment, BoolQ and WiC. The annotation results from GPT-3.5 surpasses those from crowdsourced annotation for user input and keyword relevance assessment. Additionally, for the other two tasks, GPT-3.5 achieves results that are comparable to those obtained through crowdsourced annotation.

The limited generalization of coreference resolution (CR) models has been a major bottleneck in the task's broad application. Prior work has identified annotation differences, especially for mention detection, as one of the main reasons for the generalization gap and proposed using additional annotated target domain data. Rather than relying on this additional annotation, we propose an alternative referential task, Major Entity Identification (MEI), where we: (a) assume the target entities to be specified in the input, and (b) limit the task to only the frequent entities. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MEI models generalize well across domains on multiple datasets with supervised models and LLM-based few-shot prompting. Additionally, MEI fits the classification framework, which enables the use of robust and intuitive classification-based metrics. Finally, MEI is also of practical use as it allows a user to search for all mentions of a particular entity or a group of entities of interest.

Suppose Alice trains an open-weight language model and Bob uses a blackbox derivative of Alice's model to produce text. Can Alice prove that Bob is using her model, either by querying Bob's derivative model (query setting) or from the text alone (observational setting)? We formulate this question as an independence testing problem--in which the null hypothesis is that Bob's model or text is independent of Alice's randomized training run--and investigate it through the lens of palimpsestic memorization in language models: models are more likely to memorize data seen later in training, so we can test whether Bob is using Alice's model using test statistics that capture correlation between Bob's model or text and the ordering of training examples in Alice's training run. If Alice has randomly shuffled her training data, then any significant correlation amounts to exactly quantifiable statistical evidence against the null hypothesis, regardless of the composition of Alice's training data. In the query setting, we directly estimate (via prompting) the likelihood Bob's model gives to Alice's training examples and order; we correlate the likelihoods of over 40 fine-tunes of various Pythia and OLMo base models ranging from 1B to 12B parameters with the base model's training data order, achieving a p-value on the order of at most 1e-8 in all but six cases. In the observational setting, we try two approaches based on estimating 1) the likelihood of Bob's text overlapping with spans of Alice's training examples and 2) the likelihood of Bob's text with respect to different versions of Alice's model we obtain by repeating the last phase (e.g., 1%) of her training run on reshuffled data. The second approach can reliably distinguish Bob's text from as little as a few hundred tokens; the first does not involve any retraining but requires many more tokens (several hundred thousand) to achieve high power.

Reference summaries for abstractive speech summarization require human annotation, which can be performed by listening to an audio recording or by reading textual transcripts of the recording. In this paper, we examine whether summaries based on annotators listening to the recordings differ from those based on annotators reading transcripts. Using existing intrinsic evaluation based on human evaluation, automatic metrics, LLM-based evaluation, and a retrieval-based reference-free method. We find that summaries are indeed different based on the source modality, and that speech-based summaries are more factually consistent and information-selective than transcript-based summaries. Meanwhile, transcript-based summaries are impacted by recognition errors in the source, and expert-written summaries are more informative and reliable. We make all the collected data and analysis code public(https://github.com/cmu-mlsp/interview_humanssum) to facilitate the reproduction of our work and advance research in this area.

Summary: Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an important step in biomedical information extraction pipelines. Tools for NER should be easy to use, cover multiple entity types, highly accurate, and robust towards variations in text genre and style. To this end, we propose HunFlair, an NER tagger covering multiple entity types integrated into the widely used NLP framework Flair. HunFlair outperforms other state-of-the-art standalone NER tools with an average gain of 7.26 pp over the next best tool, can be installed with a single command and is applied with only four lines of code. Availability: HunFlair is freely available through the Flair framework under an MIT license: https://github.com/flairNLP/flair and is compatible with all major operating systems. Contact:{weberple,saengema,alan.akbik}@informatik.hu-berlin.de

Learning specific hands-on skills such as cooking, car maintenance, and home repairs increasingly happens via instructional videos. The user experience with such videos is known to be improved by meta-information such as time-stamped annotations for the main steps involved. Generating such annotations automatically is challenging, and we describe here two relevant contributions. First, we construct and release a new dense video captioning dataset, Video Timeline Tags (ViTT), featuring a variety of instructional videos together with time-stamped annotations. Second, we explore several multimodal sequence-to-sequence pretraining strategies that leverage large unsupervised datasets of videos and caption-like texts. We pretrain and subsequently finetune dense video captioning models using both YouCook2 and ViTT. We show that such models generalize well and are robust over a wide variety of instructional videos.

In this paper we address issues with image retrieval benchmarking on standard and popular Oxford 5k and Paris 6k datasets. In particular, annotation errors, the size of the dataset, and the level of challenge are addressed: new annotation for both datasets is created with an extra attention to the reliability of the ground truth. Three new protocols of varying difficulty are introduced. The protocols allow fair comparison between different methods, including those using a dataset pre-processing stage. For each dataset, 15 new challenging queries are introduced. Finally, a new set of 1M hard, semi-automatically cleaned distractors is selected. An extensive comparison of the state-of-the-art methods is performed on the new benchmark. Different types of methods are evaluated, ranging from local-feature-based to modern CNN based methods. The best results are achieved by taking the best of the two worlds. Most importantly, image retrieval appears far from being solved.

Despite the progress in automatic detection of radiologic findings from chest X-ray (CXR) images in recent years, a quantitative evaluation of the explainability of these models is hampered by the lack of locally labeled datasets for different findings. With the exception of a few expert-labeled small-scale datasets for specific findings, such as pneumonia and pneumothorax, most of the CXR deep learning models to date are trained on global "weak" labels extracted from text reports, or trained via a joint image and unstructured text learning strategy. Inspired by the Visual Genome effort in the computer vision community, we constructed the first Chest ImaGenome dataset with a scene graph data structure to describe 242,072 images. Local annotations are automatically produced using a joint rule-based natural language processing (NLP) and atlas-based bounding box detection pipeline. Through a radiologist constructed CXR ontology, the annotations for each CXR are connected as an anatomy-centered scene graph, useful for image-level reasoning and multimodal fusion applications. Overall, we provide: i) 1,256 combinations of relation annotations between 29 CXR anatomical locations (objects with bounding box coordinates) and their attributes, structured as a scene graph per image, ii) over 670,000 localized comparison relations (for improved, worsened, or no change) between the anatomical locations across sequential exams, as well as ii) a manually annotated gold standard scene graph dataset from 500 unique patients.

When training data are collected from human annotators, the design of the annotation instrument, the instructions given to annotators, the characteristics of the annotators, and their interactions can impact training data. This study demonstrates that design choices made when creating an annotation instrument also impact the models trained on the resulting annotations. We introduce the term annotation sensitivity to refer to the impact of annotation data collection methods on the annotations themselves and on downstream model performance and predictions. We collect annotations of hate speech and offensive language in five experimental conditions of an annotation instrument, randomly assigning annotators to conditions. We then fine-tune BERT models on each of the five resulting datasets and evaluate model performance on a holdout portion of each condition. We find considerable differences between the conditions for 1) the share of hate speech/offensive language annotations, 2) model performance, 3) model predictions, and 4) model learning curves. Our results emphasize the crucial role played by the annotation instrument which has received little attention in the machine learning literature. We call for additional research into how and why the instrument impacts the annotations to inform the development of best practices in instrument design.

High-quality labeled data is essential for training accurate document conversion models, particularly in domains with complex formats such as tables, formulas, and multi-column text. However, manual annotation is both costly and time-consuming, while automatic labeling using existing models often lacks accuracy in handling such challenging scenarios. Consequently, training student models by distilling outputs from teacher models can significantly limit their performance in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a fully automated, distillation-free framework comprising two stages for constructing high-quality document extraction datasets and models capable of handling diverse document formats and layouts. In the first stage, we introduce a method for generating large-scale, diverse synthetic data, which enables a model to extract key elements in a unified format with strong initial performance. In the second stage, we present a self-improvement approach that further adapts the model, initially trained on synthetic data, to real-world documents. Specifically, we first use the fine-tuned model to annotate real documents, then apply a suite of filtering strategies to verify annotation quality, and finally retrain the model on the verified dataset. By iteratively repeating this process, we progressively enhance both the model's conversion capabilities and the quality of the generated data. We train a public POINTS-1.5 model to obtain POINTS-Reader, which surpasses many existing public and proprietary models of comparable or larger size. Our model is available at https://github.com/Tencent/POINTS-Reader.

Human evaluation is increasingly critical for assessing large language models, capturing linguistic nuances, and reflecting user preferences more accurately than traditional automated metrics. However, the resource-intensive nature of this type of annotation process poses significant challenges. The key question driving our work: "is it feasible to minimize human-in-the-loop feedback by prioritizing data instances which most effectively distinguish between models?" We evaluate several metric-based methods and find that these metrics enhance the efficiency of human evaluations by minimizing the number of required annotations, thus saving time and cost, while ensuring a robust performance evaluation. We show that our method is effective across widely used model families, reducing instances of indecisive (or "tie") outcomes by up to 54% compared to a random sample when focusing on the top-20 percentile of prioritized instances. This potential reduction in required human effort positions our approach as a valuable strategy in future large language model evaluations.

We present OpenNER 1.0, a standardized collection of openly-available named entity recognition (NER) datasets. OpenNER contains 36 NER corpora that span 52 languages, human-annotated in varying named entity ontologies. We correct annotation format issues, standardize the original datasets into a uniform representation with consistent entity type names across corpora, and provide the collection in a structure that enables research in multilingual and multi-ontology NER. We provide baseline results using three pretrained multilingual language models and two large language models to compare the performance of recent models and facilitate future research in NER. We find that no single model is best in all languages and that significant work remains to obtain high performance from LLMs on the NER task. OpenNER is released at https://github.com/bltlab/open-ner.

Entity linking faces significant challenges such as prolific variations and prevalent ambiguities, especially in high-value domains with myriad entities. Standard classification approaches suffer from the annotation bottleneck and cannot effectively handle unseen entities. Zero-shot entity linking has emerged as a promising direction for generalizing to new entities, but it still requires example gold entity mentions during training and canonical descriptions for all entities, both of which are rarely available outside of Wikipedia. In this paper, we explore Knowledge-RIch Self-Supervision (tt KRISS) for biomedical entity linking, by leveraging readily available domain knowledge. In training, it generates self-supervised mention examples on unlabeled text using a domain ontology and trains a contextual encoder using contrastive learning. For inference, it samples self-supervised mentions as prototypes for each entity and conducts linking by mapping the test mention to the most similar prototype. Our approach can easily incorporate entity descriptions and gold mention labels if available. We conducted extensive experiments on seven standard datasets spanning biomedical literature and clinical notes. Without using any labeled information, our method produces tt KRISSBERT, a universal entity linker for four million UMLS entities that attains new state of the art, outperforming prior self-supervised methods by as much as 20 absolute points in accuracy.

The quality of the dataset is crucial for ensuring optimal performance and reliability of downstream task models. However, datasets often contain noisy data inadvertently included during the construction process. Numerous attempts have been made to correct this issue through human annotators. However, hiring and managing human annotators is expensive and time-consuming. As an alternative, recent studies are exploring the use of large language models (LLMs) for data annotation. In this study, we present a case study that extends the application of LLM-based data annotation to enhance the quality of existing datasets through a cleansing strategy. Specifically, we leverage approaches such as chain-of-thought (CoT) and majority voting to imitate human annotation and classify unrelated documents from the Multi-News dataset, which is widely used for the multi-document summarization task. Through our proposed cleansing method, we introduce an enhanced Multi-News+. By employing LLMs for data cleansing, we demonstrate an efficient and effective approach to improving dataset quality without relying on expensive human annotation efforts.

Anthropogenic ecological crisis constitutes a significant challenge that all within the academy must urgently face, including the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. While recent years have seen increasing work revolving around climate-centric discourse, crucial environmental and ecological topics outside of climate change remain largely unaddressed, despite their prominent importance. Mainstream NLP tasks, such as sentiment analysis, dominate the scene, but there remains an untouched space in the literature involving the analysis of environmental impacts of certain events and practices. To address this gap, this paper presents EcoVerse, an annotated English Twitter dataset of 3,023 tweets spanning a wide spectrum of environmental topics. We propose a three-level annotation scheme designed for Eco-Relevance Classification, Stance Detection, and introducing an original approach for Environmental Impact Analysis. We detail the data collection, filtering, and labeling process that led to the creation of the dataset. Remarkable Inter-Annotator Agreement indicates that the annotation scheme produces consistent annotations of high quality. Subsequent classification experiments using BERT-based models, including ClimateBERT, are presented. These yield encouraging results, while also indicating room for a model specifically tailored for environmental texts. The dataset is made freely available to stimulate further research.

We introduce the AnnoPage Dataset, a novel collection of 7550 pages from historical documents, primarily in Czech and German, spanning from 1485 to the present, focusing on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The dataset is designed to support research in document layout analysis and object detection. Each page is annotated with axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABB) representing elements of 25 categories of non-textual elements, such as images, maps, decorative elements, or charts, following the Czech Methodology of image document processing. The annotations were created by expert librarians to ensure accuracy and consistency. The dataset also incorporates pages from multiple, mainly historical, document datasets to enhance variability and maintain continuity. The dataset is divided into development and test subsets, with the test set carefully selected to maintain the category distribution. We provide baseline results using YOLO and DETR object detectors, offering a reference point for future research. The AnnoPage Dataset is publicly available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12788419), along with ground-truth annotations in YOLO format.

Over the past decade, the revolution in single-cell sequencing has enabled the simultaneous molecular profiling of various modalities across thousands of individual cells, allowing scientists to investigate the diverse functions of complex tissues and uncover underlying disease mechanisms. Among all the analytical steps, assigning individual cells to specific types is fundamental for understanding cellular heterogeneity. However, this process is usually labor-intensive and requires extensive expert knowledge. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to efficiently process and synthesize vast corpora of text to automatically extract essential biological knowledge, such as marker genes, potentially promoting more efficient and automated cell type annotations. To thoroughly evaluate the capability of modern instruction-tuned LLMs in automating the cell type identification process, we introduce SOAR, a comprehensive benchmarking study of LLMs for cell type annotation tasks in single-cell genomics. Specifically, we assess the performance of 8 instruction-tuned LLMs across 11 datasets, spanning multiple cell types and species. Our study explores the potential of LLMs to accurately classify and annotate cell types in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data, while extending their application to multiomics data through cross-modality translation. Additionally, we evaluate the effectiveness of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting techniques in generating detailed biological insights during the annotation process. The results demonstrate that LLMs can provide robust interpretations of single-cell data without requiring additional fine-tuning, advancing the automation of cell type annotation in genomics research.

Annotated data plays a critical role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in training models and evaluating their performance. Given recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs), models such as ChatGPT demonstrate zero-shot capability on many text-annotation tasks, comparable with or even exceeding human annotators. Such LLMs can serve as alternatives for manual annotation, due to lower costs and higher scalability. However, limited work has leveraged LLMs as complementary annotators, nor explored how annotation work is best allocated among humans and LLMs to achieve both quality and cost objectives. We propose CoAnnotating, a novel paradigm for Human-LLM co-annotation of unstructured texts at scale. Under this framework, we utilize uncertainty to estimate LLMs' annotation capability. Our empirical study shows CoAnnotating to be an effective means to allocate work from results on different datasets, with up to 21% performance improvement over random baseline. For code implementation, see https://github.com/SALT-NLP/CoAnnotating.

Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with instruction tuning have made significant progress when generalizing to unseen tasks. However, they have been less successful in Information Extraction (IE), lagging behind task-specific models. Typically, IE tasks are characterized by complex annotation guidelines which describe the task and give examples to humans. Previous attempts to leverage such information have failed, even with the largest models, as they are not able to follow the guidelines out-of-the-box. In this paper we propose GoLLIE (Guideline-following Large Language Model for IE), a model able to improve zero-shot results on unseen IE tasks by virtue of being fine-tuned to comply with annotation guidelines. Comprehensive evaluation empirically demonstrates that GoLLIE is able to generalize to and follow unseen guidelines, outperforming previous attempts at zero-shot information extraction. The ablation study shows that detailed guidelines is key for good results.

This system paper presents the DeMeVa team's approaches to the third edition of the Learning with Disagreements shared task (LeWiDi 2025; Leonardelli et al., 2025). We explore two directions: in-context learning (ICL) with large language models, where we compare example sampling strategies; and label distribution learning (LDL) methods with RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019b), where we evaluate several fine-tuning methods. Our contributions are twofold: (1) we show that ICL can effectively predict annotator-specific annotations (perspectivist annotations), and that aggregating these predictions into soft labels yields competitive performance; and (2) we argue that LDL methods are promising for soft label predictions and merit further exploration by the perspectivist community.

We introduce Biomed-Enriched, a biomedical text dataset constructed from PubMed via a two-stage annotation process. In the first stage, a large language model annotates 400K paragraphs from PubMed scientific articles, assigning scores for their type (review, study, clinical case, other), domain (clinical, biomedical, other), and educational quality. The educational quality score (rated 1 to 5) estimates how useful a paragraph is for college-level learning. These annotations are then used to fine-tune a small language model, which propagates the labels across the full PMC-OA corpus. The resulting metadata allows us to extract refined subsets, including 2M clinical case paragraphs with over 450K high-quality ones from articles with commercial-use licenses, and to construct several variants via quality filtering and domain upsampling. Clinical text is typically difficult to access due to privacy constraints, as hospital records cannot be publicly shared. Hence, our dataset provides an alternative large-scale, openly available collection of clinical cases from PubMed, making it a valuable resource for biomedical and clinical NLP. Preliminary continual-pretraining experiments with OLMo2 suggest these curated subsets enable targeted improvements, with clinical upsampling boosting performance by ~5% on MMLU ProfMed and educational quality filtering improving MedQA and MedMCQA by ~1%. Combinations of these techniques led to faster convergence, reaching same performance with a third of training tokens, indicating potential for more efficient and effective biomedical pretraining strategies.

Natural language understanding (NLU) is a task that enables machines to understand human language. Some tasks, such as stance detection and sentiment analysis, are closely related to individual subjective perspectives, thus termed individual-level NLU. Previously, these tasks are often simplified to text-level NLU tasks, ignoring individual factors. This not only makes inference difficult and unexplainable but often results in a large number of label errors when creating datasets. To address the above limitations, we propose a new NLU annotation guideline based on individual-level factors. Specifically, we incorporate other posts by the same individual and then annotate individual subjective perspectives after considering all individual posts. We use this guideline to expand and re-annotate the stance detection and topic-based sentiment analysis datasets. We find that error rates in the samples were as high as 31.7\% and 23.3\%. We further use large language models to conduct experiments on the re-annotation datasets and find that the large language models perform well on both datasets after adding individual factors. Both GPT-4o and Llama3-70B can achieve an accuracy greater than 87\% on the re-annotation datasets. We also verify the effectiveness of individual factors through ablation studies. We call on future researchers to add individual factors when creating such datasets. Our re-annotation dataset can be found at https://github.com/24yearsoldstudent/Individual-NLU

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in a broad range of vision-language tasks with their strong reasoning and generalization capabilities. However, they heavily depend on high-quality data in the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) phase. The existing approaches aim to curate high-quality data via GPT-4V, but they are not scalable due to the commercial nature of GPT-4V and the simplicity of the prompts used to instruct the model. To this end, we devised the FullAnno system, which is a data engine that can generate large-scale, high-quality, and fine-grained image annotations consisting of the category and position of objects, region descriptions, text information, as well as image dense captions. This engine is characterized by its cascade annotation process, which involves multiple expert models and employs rich prompts to instruct LLMs in generating dense image captions. We re-annotated the COCO and Visual Genome datasets using our FullAnno system, tripling the number of object annotations and increasing the length of the original image captions by a factor of 15. Experiments show that the regenerated annotation can significantly enhance the capabilities of LLaVA-v1.5 on several benchmarks. The re-annotated data are available at: https://arcana-project-page.github.io

Named Entity Recognition (NER) models capable of Continual Learning (CL) are realistically valuable in areas where entity types continuously increase (e.g., personal assistants). Meanwhile the learning paradigm of NER advances to new patterns such as the span-based methods. However, its potential to CL has not been fully explored. In this paper, we propose SpanKL, a simple yet effective Span-based model with Knowledge distillation (KD) to preserve memories and multi-Label prediction to prevent conflicts in CL-NER. Unlike prior sequence labeling approaches, the inherently independent modeling in span and entity level with the designed coherent optimization on SpanKL promotes its learning at each incremental step and mitigates the forgetting. Experiments on synthetic CL datasets derived from OntoNotes and Few-NERD show that SpanKL significantly outperforms previous SoTA in many aspects, and obtains the smallest gap from CL to the upper bound revealing its high practiced value. The code is available at https://github.com/Qznan/SpanKL.

We present the Verifee Dataset: a novel dataset of news articles with fine-grained trustworthiness annotations. We develop a detailed methodology that assesses the texts based on their parameters encompassing editorial transparency, journalist conventions, and objective reporting while penalizing manipulative techniques. We bring aboard a diverse set of researchers from social, media, and computer sciences to overcome barriers and limited framing of this interdisciplinary problem. We collect over 10,000 unique articles from almost 60 Czech online news sources. These are categorized into one of the 4 classes across the credibility spectrum we propose, raging from entirely trustworthy articles all the way to the manipulative ones. We produce detailed statistics and study trends emerging throughout the set. Lastly, we fine-tune multiple popular sequence-to-sequence language models using our dataset on the trustworthiness classification task and report the best testing F-1 score of 0.52. We open-source the dataset, annotation methodology, and annotators' instructions in full length at https://verifee.ai/research to enable easy build-up work. We believe similar methods can help prevent disinformation and educate in the realm of media literacy.

Training with sparse annotations is known to reduce the performance of object detectors. Previous methods have focused on proxies for missing ground truth annotations in the form of pseudo-labels for unlabeled boxes. We observe that existing methods suffer at higher levels of sparsity in the data due to noisy pseudo-labels. To prevent this, we propose an end-to-end system that learns to separate the proposals into labeled and unlabeled regions using Pseudo-positive mining. While the labeled regions are processed as usual, self-supervised learning is used to process the unlabeled regions thereby preventing the negative effects of noisy pseudo-labels. This novel approach has multiple advantages such as improved robustness to higher sparsity when compared to existing methods. We conduct exhaustive experiments on five splits on the PASCAL-VOC and COCO datasets achieving state-of-the-art performance. We also unify various splits used across literature for this task and present a standardized benchmark. On average, we improve by 2.6, 3.9 and 9.6 mAP over previous state-of-the-art methods on three splits of increasing sparsity on COCO. Our project is publicly available at https://www.cs.umd.edu/~sakshams/SparseDet.

The CoNLL-03 corpus is arguably the most well-known and utilized benchmark dataset for named entity recognition (NER). However, prior works found significant numbers of annotation errors, incompleteness, and inconsistencies in the data. This poses challenges to objectively comparing NER approaches and analyzing their errors, as current state-of-the-art models achieve F1-scores that are comparable to or even exceed the estimated noise level in CoNLL-03. To address this issue, we present a comprehensive relabeling effort assisted by automatic consistency checking that corrects 7.0% of all labels in the English CoNLL-03. Our effort adds a layer of entity linking annotation both for better explainability of NER labels and as additional safeguard of annotation quality. Our experimental evaluation finds not only that state-of-the-art approaches reach significantly higher F1-scores (97.1%) on our data, but crucially that the share of correct predictions falsely counted as errors due to annotation noise drops from 47% to 6%. This indicates that our resource is well suited to analyze the remaining errors made by state-of-the-art models, and that the theoretical upper bound even on high resource, coarse-grained NER is not yet reached. To facilitate such analysis, we make CleanCoNLL publicly available to the research community.

Large language models are now routinely used in high-stakes applications where hallucinations can cause serious harm, such as medical consultations or legal advice. Existing hallucination detection methods, however, are impractical for real-world use, as they are either limited to short factual queries or require costly external verification. We present a cheap, scalable method for real-time identification of hallucinated tokens in long-form generations, and scale it effectively to 70B parameter models. Our approach targets entity-level hallucinations -- e.g., fabricated names, dates, citations -- rather than claim-level, thereby naturally mapping to token-level labels and enabling streaming detection. We develop an annotation methodology that leverages web search to annotate model responses with grounded labels indicating which tokens correspond to fabricated entities. This dataset enables us to train effective hallucination classifiers with simple and efficient methods such as linear probes. Evaluating across four model families, our classifiers consistently outperform baselines on long-form responses, including more expensive methods such as semantic entropy (e.g., AUC 0.90 vs 0.71 for Llama-3.3-70B), and are also an improvement in short-form question-answering settings. Moreover, despite being trained only with entity-level labels, our probes effectively detect incorrect answers in mathematical reasoning tasks, indicating generalization beyond entities. While our annotation methodology is expensive, we find that annotated responses from one model can be used to train effective classifiers on other models; accordingly, we publicly release our datasets to facilitate reuse. Overall, our work suggests a promising new approach for scalable, real-world hallucination detection.

Publishing open-source academic video recordings is an emergent and prevalent approach to sharing knowledge online. Such videos carry rich multimodal information including speech, the facial and body movements of the speakers, as well as the texts and pictures in the slides and possibly even the papers. Although multiple academic video datasets have been constructed and released, few of them support both multimodal content recognition and understanding tasks, which is partially due to the lack of high-quality human annotations. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal, multigenre, and multipurpose audio-visual academic lecture dataset (M^3AV), which has almost 367 hours of videos from five sources covering computer science, mathematics, and medical and biology topics. With high-quality human annotations of the spoken and written words, in particular high-valued name entities, the dataset can be used for multiple audio-visual recognition and understanding tasks. Evaluations performed on contextual speech recognition, speech synthesis, and slide and script generation tasks demonstrate that the diversity of M^3AV makes it a challenging dataset.

In this paper we introduce a new publicly available dataset for verification against textual sources, FEVER: Fact Extraction and VERification. It consists of 185,445 claims generated by altering sentences extracted from Wikipedia and subsequently verified without knowledge of the sentence they were derived from. The claims are classified as Supported, Refuted or NotEnoughInfo by annotators achieving 0.6841 in Fleiss kappa. For the first two classes, the annotators also recorded the sentence(s) forming the necessary evidence for their judgment. To characterize the challenge of the dataset presented, we develop a pipeline approach and compare it to suitably designed oracles. The best accuracy we achieve on labeling a claim accompanied by the correct evidence is 31.87%, while if we ignore the evidence we achieve 50.91%. Thus we believe that FEVER is a challenging testbed that will help stimulate progress on claim verification against textual sources.

In-Context Learning (ICL) technique based on Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained prominence in Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks for its lower computing resource consumption, less manual labeling overhead, and stronger generalizability. Nevertheless, most ICL-based NER methods depend on large-parameter LLMs: the open-source models demand substantial computational resources for deployment and inference, while the closed-source ones incur high API costs, raise data-privacy concerns, and hinder community collaboration. To address this question, we propose an Ensemble Learning Method for Named Entity Recognition (EL4NER), which aims at aggregating the ICL outputs of multiple open-source, small-parameter LLMs to enhance overall performance in NER tasks at less deployment and inference cost. Specifically, our method comprises three key components. First, we design a task decomposition-based pipeline that facilitates deep, multi-stage ensemble learning. Second, we introduce a novel span-level sentence similarity algorithm to establish an ICL demonstration retrieval mechanism better suited for NER tasks. Third, we incorporate a self-validation mechanism to mitigate the noise introduced during the ensemble process. We evaluated EL4NER on multiple widely adopted NER datasets from diverse domains. Our experimental results indicate that EL4NER surpasses most closed-source, large-parameter LLM-based methods at a lower parameter cost and even attains state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among ICL-based methods on certain datasets. These results show the parameter efficiency of EL4NER and underscore the feasibility of employing open-source, small-parameter LLMs within the ICL paradigm for NER tasks.

Large crowd-sourced datasets are often noisy and relation classification (RC) datasets are no exception. Reannotating the entire dataset is one probable solution however it is not always viable due to time and budget constraints. This paper addresses the problem of efficient reannotation of a large noisy dataset for the RC. Our goal is to catch more annotation errors in the dataset while reannotating fewer instances. Existing work on RC dataset reannotation lacks the flexibility about how much data to reannotate. We introduce the concept of a reannotation budget to overcome this limitation. The immediate follow-up problem is: Given a specific reannotation budget, which subset of the data should we reannotate? To address this problem, we present two strategies to selectively reannotate RC datasets. Our strategies utilize the taxonomic hierarchy of relation labels. The intuition of our work is to rely on the graph distance between actual and predicted relation labels in the label hierarchy graph. We evaluate our reannotation strategies on the well-known TACRED dataset. We design our experiments to answer three specific research questions. First, does our strategy select novel candidates for reannotation? Second, for a given reannotation budget is our reannotation strategy more efficient at catching annotation errors? Third, what is the impact of data reannotation on RC model performance measurement? Experimental results show that our both reannotation strategies are novel and efficient. Our analysis indicates that the current reported performance of RC models on noisy TACRED data is inflated.

Recent advances in multimodal pre-trained models have significantly improved information extraction from visually-rich documents (VrDs), in which named entity recognition (NER) is treated as a sequence-labeling task of predicting the BIO entity tags for tokens, following the typical setting of NLP. However, BIO-tagging scheme relies on the correct order of model inputs, which is not guaranteed in real-world NER on scanned VrDs where text are recognized and arranged by OCR systems. Such reading order issue hinders the accurate marking of entities by BIO-tagging scheme, making it impossible for sequence-labeling methods to predict correct named entities. To address the reading order issue, we introduce Token Path Prediction (TPP), a simple prediction head to predict entity mentions as token sequences within documents. Alternative to token classification, TPP models the document layout as a complete directed graph of tokens, and predicts token paths within the graph as entities. For better evaluation of VrD-NER systems, we also propose two revised benchmark datasets of NER on scanned documents which can reflect real-world scenarios. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and suggest its potential to be a universal solution to various information extraction tasks on documents.

We present the development of a dataset for Kazakh named entity recognition. The dataset was built as there is a clear need for publicly available annotated corpora in Kazakh, as well as annotation guidelines containing straightforward--but rigorous--rules and examples. The dataset annotation, based on the IOB2 scheme, was carried out on television news text by two native Kazakh speakers under the supervision of the first author. The resulting dataset contains 112,702 sentences and 136,333 annotations for 25 entity classes. State-of-the-art machine learning models to automatise Kazakh named entity recognition were also built, with the best-performing model achieving an exact match F1-score of 97.22% on the test set. The annotated dataset, guidelines, and codes used to train the models are freely available for download under the CC BY 4.0 licence from https://github.com/IS2AI/KazNERD.

We introduce a corpus of 7,032 sentences rated by human annotators for formality, informativeness, and implicature on a 1-7 scale. The corpus was annotated using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Reliability in the obtained judgments was examined by comparing mean ratings across two MTurk experiments, and correlation with pilot annotations (on sentence formality) conducted in a more controlled setting. Despite the subjectivity and inherent difficulty of the annotation task, correlations between mean ratings were quite encouraging, especially on formality and informativeness. We further explored correlation between the three linguistic variables, genre-wise variation of ratings and correlations within genres, compatibility with automatic stylistic scoring, and sentential make-up of a document in terms of style. To date, our corpus is the largest sentence-level annotated corpus released for formality, informativeness, and implicature.

Textual domain is a crucial property within the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community due to its effects on downstream model performance. The concept itself is, however, loosely defined and, in practice, refers to any non-typological property, such as genre, topic, medium or style of a document. We investigate the core notion of domains via human proficiency in identifying related intrinsic textual properties, specifically the concepts of genre (communicative purpose) and topic (subject matter). We publish our annotations in *TGeGUM*: A collection of 9.1k sentences from the GUM dataset (Zeldes, 2017) with single sentence and larger context (i.e., prose) annotations for one of 11 genres (source type), and its topic/subtopic as per the Dewey Decimal library classification system (Dewey, 1979), consisting of 10/100 hierarchical topics of increased granularity. Each instance is annotated by three annotators, for a total of 32.7k annotations, allowing us to examine the level of human disagreement and the relative difficulty of each annotation task. With a Fleiss' kappa of at most 0.53 on the sentence level and 0.66 at the prose level, it is evident that despite the ubiquity of domains in NLP, there is little human consensus on how to define them. By training classifiers to perform the same task, we find that this uncertainty also extends to NLP models.

We provide a literature review about Automatic Text Summarization (ATS) systems. We consider a citation-based approach. We start with some popular and well-known papers that we have in hand about each topic we want to cover and we have tracked the "backward citations" (papers that are cited by the set of papers we knew beforehand) and the "forward citations" (newer papers that cite the set of papers we knew beforehand). In order to organize the different methods, we present the diverse approaches to ATS guided by the mechanisms they use to generate a summary. Besides presenting the methods, we also present an extensive review of the datasets available for summarization tasks and the methods used to evaluate the quality of the summaries. Finally, we present an empirical exploration of these methods using the CNN Corpus dataset that provides golden summaries for extractive and abstractive methods.

Annotator disagreement is ubiquitous in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. There are multiple reasons for such disagreements, including the subjectivity of the task, difficult cases, unclear guidelines, and so on. Rather than simply aggregating labels to obtain data annotations, we instead try to directly model the diverse perspectives of the annotators, and explicitly account for annotators' idiosyncrasies in the modeling process by creating representations for each annotator (annotator embeddings) and also their annotations (annotation embeddings). In addition, we propose TID-8, The Inherent Disagreement - 8 dataset, a benchmark that consists of eight existing language understanding datasets that have inherent annotator disagreement. We test our approach on TID-8 and show that our approach helps models learn significantly better from disagreements on six different datasets in TID-8 while increasing model size by fewer than 1% parameters. By capturing the unique tendencies and subjectivity of individual annotators through embeddings, our representations prime AI models to be inclusive of diverse viewpoints.

Open community-driven platforms like Chatbot Arena that collect user preference data from site visitors have gained a reputation as one of the most trustworthy publicly available benchmarks for LLM performance. While now standard, it is tricky to implement effective guardrails to collect high-quality annotations from humans. In this paper, we demonstrate that three sources of bad annotations, both malicious and otherwise, can corrupt the reliability of open leaderboard rankings. In particular, we show that only 10\% of poor quality votes by apathetic (site visitors not appropriately incentivized to give correct votes) or adversarial (bad actors seeking to inflate the ranking of a target model) annotators can change the rankings of models by up to 5 places on the leaderboard. Finally, we discuss open challenges in ensuring high-quality human annotations.

By compressing diverse narratives, LLMs go beyond memorization, achieving intelligence by capturing generalizable causal relationships. However, they suffer from local 'representation gaps' due to insufficient training data diversity, limiting their real-world utility, especially in tasks requiring strict alignment to rules. Traditional alignment methods relying on heavy human annotations are inefficient and unscalable. Recent self-alignment techniques also fall short, as they often depend on self-selection based prompting and memorization-based learning. To address these issues, we introduce Iterative Graph Alignment (IGA), an annotation-free rule-based alignment algorithm. A teacher model (VLM) employs Iterative Graph Prompting (IGP) to create logical graphs and reference answers. The student model (LLM) identifies local knowledge gaps by attempting to align its responses with these references, collaborating with helper models to generate diverse answers. These aligned responses are then used for iterative supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Our evaluations across five rule-based scenarios demonstrate IGP's effectiveness, with a 73.12\% alignment improvement in Claude Sonnet 3.5, and Llama3-8B-Instruct achieving an 86.20\% improvement, outperforming Claude Sonnet 3.5 in rule-based alignment.

The advancement of machine learning algorithms in medical image analysis requires the expansion of training datasets. A popular and cost-effective approach is automated annotation extraction from free-text medical reports, primarily due to the high costs associated with expert clinicians annotating medical images, such as chest X-rays. However, it has been shown that the resulting datasets are susceptible to biases and shortcuts. Another strategy to increase the size of a dataset is crowdsourcing, a widely adopted practice in general computer vision with some success in medical image analysis. In a similar vein to crowdsourcing, we enhance two publicly available chest X-ray datasets by incorporating non-expert annotations. However, instead of using diagnostic labels, we annotate shortcuts in the form of tubes. We collect 3.5k chest drain annotations for NIH-CXR14, and 1k annotations for four different tube types in PadChest, and create the Non-Expert Annotations of Tubes in X-rays (NEATX) dataset. We train a chest drain detector with the non-expert annotations that generalizes well to expert labels. Moreover, we compare our annotations to those provided by experts and show "moderate" to "almost perfect" agreement. Finally, we present a pathology agreement study to raise awareness about the quality of ground truth annotations. We make our dataset available on Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/records/14944064 and our code available at https://github.com/purrlab/chestxr-label-reliability.

Understanding causal narratives communicated in clinical notes can help make strides towards personalized healthcare. Extracted causal information from clinical notes can be combined with structured EHR data such as patients' demographics, diagnoses, and medications. This will enhance healthcare providers' ability to identify aspects of a patient's story communicated in the clinical notes and help make more informed decisions. In this work, we propose annotation guidelines, develop an annotated corpus and provide baseline scores to identify types and direction of causal relations between a pair of biomedical concepts in clinical notes; communicated implicitly or explicitly, identified either in a single sentence or across multiple sentences. We annotate a total of 2714 de-identified examples sampled from the 2018 n2c2 shared task dataset and train four different language model based architectures. Annotation based on our guidelines achieved a high inter-annotator agreement i.e. Fleiss' kappa (kappa) score of 0.72, and our model for identification of causal relations achieved a macro F1 score of 0.56 on the test data. The high inter-annotator agreement for clinical text shows the quality of our annotation guidelines while the provided baseline F1 score sets the direction for future research towards understanding narratives in clinical texts.

Recently, open-domain question answering systems have begun to rely heavily on annotated datasets to train neural passage retrievers. However, manually annotating such datasets is both difficult and time-consuming, which limits their availability for less popular languages. In this work, we experiment with several methods for automatically collecting weakly labeled datasets and show how they affect the performance of the neural passage retrieval models. As a result of our work, we publish the MAUPQA dataset, consisting of nearly 400,000 question-passage pairs for Polish, as well as the HerBERT-QA neural retriever.

The vast majority of existing datasets for Named Entity Recognition (NER) are built primarily on news, research papers and Wikipedia with a few exceptions, created from historical and literary texts. What is more, English is the main source for data for further labelling. This paper aims to fill in multiple gaps by creating a novel dataset "Razmecheno", gathered from the diary texts of the project "Prozhito" in Russian. Our dataset is of interest for multiple research lines: literary studies of diary texts, transfer learning from other domains, low-resource or cross-lingual named entity recognition. Razmecheno comprises 1331 sentences and 14119 tokens, sampled from diaries, written during the Perestroika. The annotation schema consists of five commonly used entity tags: person, characteristics, location, organisation, and facility. The labelling is carried out on the crowdsourcing platfrom Yandex.Toloka in two stages. First, workers selected sentences, which contain an entity of particular type. Second, they marked up entity spans. As a result 1113 entities were obtained. Empirical evaluation of Razmecheno is carried out with off-the-shelf NER tools and by fine-tuning pre-trained contextualized encoders. We release the annotated dataset for open access.

Document pair extraction aims to identify key and value entities as well as their relationships from visually-rich documents. Most existing methods divide it into two separate tasks: semantic entity recognition (SER) and relation extraction (RE). However, simply concatenating SER and RE serially can lead to severe error propagation, and it fails to handle cases like multi-line entities in real scenarios. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel framework, PEneo (Pair Extraction new decoder option), which performs document pair extraction in a unified pipeline, incorporating three concurrent sub-tasks: line extraction, line grouping, and entity linking. This approach alleviates the error accumulation problem and can handle the case of multi-line entities. Furthermore, to better evaluate the model's performance and to facilitate future research on pair extraction, we introduce RFUND, a re-annotated version of the commonly used FUNSD and XFUND datasets, to make them more accurate and cover realistic situations. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate PEneo's superiority over previous pipelines, boosting the performance by a large margin (e.g., 19.89%-22.91% F1 score on RFUND-EN) when combined with various backbones like LiLT and LayoutLMv3, showing its effectiveness and generality. Codes and the new annotations will be open to the public.

Named-entity recognition (NER) aims at identifying entities of interest in a text. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have recently been shown to outperform existing NER systems. However, ANNs remain challenging to use for non-expert users. In this paper, we present NeuroNER, an easy-to-use named-entity recognition tool based on ANNs. Users can annotate entities using a graphical web-based user interface (BRAT): the annotations are then used to train an ANN, which in turn predict entities' locations and categories in new texts. NeuroNER makes this annotation-training-prediction flow smooth and accessible to anyone.

In this work, we present a manually annotated corpus for Adverse Event (AE) extraction from discharge summaries of elderly patients, a population often underrepresented in clinical NLP resources. The dataset includes 14 clinically significant AEs-such as falls, delirium, and intracranial haemorrhage, along with contextual attributes like negation, diagnosis type, and in-hospital occurrence. Uniquely, the annotation schema supports both discontinuous and overlapping entities, addressing challenges rarely tackled in prior work. We evaluate multiple models using FlairNLP across three annotation granularities: fine-grained, coarse-grained, and coarse-grained with negation. While transformer-based models (e.g., BERT-cased) achieve strong performance on document-level coarse-grained extraction (F1 = 0.943), performance drops notably for fine-grained entity-level tasks (e.g., F1 = 0.675), particularly for rare events and complex attributes. These results demonstrate that despite high-level scores, significant challenges remain in detecting underrepresented AEs and capturing nuanced clinical language. Developed within a Trusted Research Environment (TRE), the dataset is available upon request via DataLoch and serves as a robust benchmark for evaluating AE extraction methods and supporting future cross-dataset generalisation.

We introduce SelfCite, a novel self-supervised approach that aligns LLMs to generate high-quality, fine-grained, sentence-level citations for the statements in their generated responses. Instead of only relying on costly and labor-intensive annotations, SelfCite leverages a reward signal provided by the LLM itself through context ablation: If a citation is necessary, removing the cited text from the context should prevent the same response; if sufficient, retaining the cited text alone should preserve the same response. This reward can guide the inference-time best-of-N sampling strategy to improve citation quality significantly, as well as be used in preference optimization to directly fine-tune the models for generating better citations. The effectiveness of SelfCite is demonstrated by increasing citation F1 up to 5.3 points on the LongBench-Cite benchmark across five long-form question answering tasks.