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Sep 4

Beyond True or False: Retrieval-Augmented Hierarchical Analysis of Nuanced Claims

Claims made by individuals or entities are oftentimes nuanced and cannot be clearly labeled as entirely "true" or "false" -- as is frequently the case with scientific and political claims. However, a claim (e.g., "vaccine A is better than vaccine B") can be dissected into its integral aspects and sub-aspects (e.g., efficacy, safety, distribution), which are individually easier to validate. This enables a more comprehensive, structured response that provides a well-rounded perspective on a given problem while also allowing the reader to prioritize specific angles of interest within the claim (e.g., safety towards children). Thus, we propose ClaimSpect, a retrieval-augmented generation-based framework for automatically constructing a hierarchy of aspects typically considered when addressing a claim and enriching them with corpus-specific perspectives. This structure hierarchically partitions an input corpus to retrieve relevant segments, which assist in discovering new sub-aspects. Moreover, these segments enable the discovery of varying perspectives towards an aspect of the claim (e.g., support, neutral, or oppose) and their respective prevalence (e.g., "how many biomedical papers believe vaccine A is more transportable than B?"). We apply ClaimSpect to a wide variety of real-world scientific and political claims featured in our constructed dataset, showcasing its robustness and accuracy in deconstructing a nuanced claim and representing perspectives within a corpus. Through real-world case studies and human evaluation, we validate its effectiveness over multiple baselines.

Science Hierarchography: Hierarchical Organization of Science Literature

Scientific knowledge is growing rapidly, making it challenging to track progress and high-level conceptual links across broad disciplines. While existing tools like citation networks and search engines make it easy to access a few related papers, they fundamentally lack the flexible abstraction needed to represent the density of activity in various scientific subfields. We motivate SCIENCE HIERARCHOGRAPHY, the goal of organizing scientific literature into a high-quality hierarchical structure that allows for the categorization of scientific work across varying levels of abstraction, from very broad fields to very specific studies. Such a representation can provide insights into which fields are well-explored and which are under-explored. To achieve the goals of SCIENCE HIERARCHOGRAPHY, we develop a range of algorithms. Our primary approach combines fast embedding-based clustering with LLM-based prompting to balance the computational efficiency of embedding methods with the semantic precision offered by LLM prompting. We demonstrate that this approach offers the best trade-off between quality and speed compared to methods that heavily rely on LLM prompting, such as iterative tree construction with LLMs. To better reflect the interdisciplinary and multifaceted nature of research papers, our hierarchy captures multiple dimensions of categorization beyond simple topic labels. We evaluate the utility of our framework by assessing how effectively an LLM-based agent can locate target papers using the hierarchy. Results show that this structured approach enhances interpretability, supports trend discovery, and offers an alternative pathway for exploring scientific literature beyond traditional search methods. Code, data and demo: https://github.com/JHU-CLSP/science-hierarchography{https://github.com/JHU-CLSP/science-hierarchography}

TaxoAdapt: Aligning LLM-Based Multidimensional Taxonomy Construction to Evolving Research Corpora

The rapid evolution of scientific fields introduces challenges in organizing and retrieving scientific literature. While expert-curated taxonomies have traditionally addressed this need, the process is time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, recent automatic taxonomy construction methods either (1) over-rely on a specific corpus, sacrificing generalizability, or (2) depend heavily on the general knowledge of large language models (LLMs) contained within their pre-training datasets, often overlooking the dynamic nature of evolving scientific domains. Additionally, these approaches fail to account for the multi-faceted nature of scientific literature, where a single research paper may contribute to multiple dimensions (e.g., methodology, new tasks, evaluation metrics, benchmarks). To address these gaps, we propose TaxoAdapt, a framework that dynamically adapts an LLM-generated taxonomy to a given corpus across multiple dimensions. TaxoAdapt performs iterative hierarchical classification, expanding both the taxonomy width and depth based on corpus' topical distribution. We demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of computer science conferences over the years to showcase its ability to structure and capture the evolution of scientific fields. As a multidimensional method, TaxoAdapt generates taxonomies that are 26.51% more granularity-preserving and 50.41% more coherent than the most competitive baselines judged by LLMs.

Leveraging the Power of LLMs: A Fine-Tuning Approach for High-Quality Aspect-Based Summarization

The ever-increasing volume of digital information necessitates efficient methods for users to extract key insights from lengthy documents. Aspect-based summarization offers a targeted approach, generating summaries focused on specific aspects within a document. Despite advancements in aspect-based summarization research, there is a continuous quest for improved model performance. Given that large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the potential to revolutionize diverse tasks within natural language processing, particularly in the problem of summarization, this paper explores the potential of fine-tuning LLMs for the aspect-based summarization task. We evaluate the impact of fine-tuning open-source foundation LLMs, including Llama2, Mistral, Gemma and Aya, on a publicly available domain-specific aspect based summary dataset. We hypothesize that this approach will enable these models to effectively identify and extract aspect-related information, leading to superior quality aspect-based summaries compared to the state-of-the-art. We establish a comprehensive evaluation framework to compare the performance of fine-tuned LLMs against competing aspect-based summarization methods and vanilla counterparts of the fine-tuned LLMs. Our work contributes to the field of aspect-based summarization by demonstrating the efficacy of fine-tuning LLMs for generating high-quality aspect-based summaries. Furthermore, it opens doors for further exploration of using LLMs for targeted information extraction tasks across various NLP domains.

CHIME: LLM-Assisted Hierarchical Organization of Scientific Studies for Literature Review Support

Literature review requires researchers to synthesize a large amount of information and is increasingly challenging as the scientific literature expands. In this work, we investigate the potential of LLMs for producing hierarchical organizations of scientific studies to assist researchers with literature review. We define hierarchical organizations as tree structures where nodes refer to topical categories and every node is linked to the studies assigned to that category. Our naive LLM-based pipeline for hierarchy generation from a set of studies produces promising yet imperfect hierarchies, motivating us to collect CHIME, an expert-curated dataset for this task focused on biomedicine. Given the challenging and time-consuming nature of building hierarchies from scratch, we use a human-in-the-loop process in which experts correct errors (both links between categories and study assignment) in LLM-generated hierarchies. CHIME contains 2,174 LLM-generated hierarchies covering 472 topics, and expert-corrected hierarchies for a subset of 100 topics. Expert corrections allow us to quantify LLM performance, and we find that while they are quite good at generating and organizing categories, their assignment of studies to categories could be improved. We attempt to train a corrector model with human feedback which improves study assignment by 12.6 F1 points. We release our dataset and models to encourage research on developing better assistive tools for literature review.

Hierarchical Prompting Taxonomy: A Universal Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models

Assessing the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in addressing diverse tasks is essential for comprehending their strengths and weaknesses. Conventional evaluation techniques typically apply a single prompting strategy uniformly across datasets, not considering the varying degrees of task complexity. We introduce the Hierarchical Prompting Taxonomy (HPT), a taxonomy that employs a Hierarchical Prompt Framework (HPF) composed of five unique prompting strategies, arranged from the simplest to the most complex, to assess LLMs more precisely and to offer a clearer perspective. This taxonomy assigns a score, called the Hierarchical Prompting Score (HP-Score), to datasets as well as LLMs based on the rules of the taxonomy, providing a nuanced understanding of their ability to solve diverse tasks and offering a universal measure of task complexity. Additionally, we introduce the Adaptive Hierarchical Prompt framework, which automates the selection of appropriate prompting strategies for each task. This study compares manual and adaptive hierarchical prompt frameworks using four instruction-tuned LLMs, namely Llama 3 8B, Phi 3 3.8B, Mistral 7B, and Gemma 7B, across four datasets: BoolQ, CommonSenseQA (CSQA), IWSLT-2017 en-fr (IWSLT), and SamSum. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of HPT, providing a reliable way to compare different tasks and LLM capabilities. This paper leads to the development of a universal evaluation metric that can be used to evaluate both the complexity of the datasets and the capabilities of LLMs. The implementation of both manual HPF and adaptive HPF is publicly available.

Is It Really Long Context if All You Need Is Retrieval? Towards Genuinely Difficult Long Context NLP

Improvements in language models' capabilities have pushed their applications towards longer contexts, making long-context evaluation and development an active research area. However, many disparate use-cases are grouped together under the umbrella term of "long-context", defined simply by the total length of the model's input, including - for example - Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks, book summarization, and information aggregation. Given their varied difficulty, in this position paper we argue that conflating different tasks by their context length is unproductive. As a community, we require a more precise vocabulary to understand what makes long-context tasks similar or different. We propose to unpack the taxonomy of long-context based on the properties that make them more difficult with longer contexts. We propose two orthogonal axes of difficulty: (I) Diffusion: How hard is it to find the necessary information in the context? (II) Scope: How much necessary information is there to find? We survey the literature on long-context, provide justification for this taxonomy as an informative descriptor, and situate the literature with respect to it. We conclude that the most difficult and interesting settings, whose necessary information is very long and highly diffused within the input, is severely under-explored. By using a descriptive vocabulary and discussing the relevant properties of difficulty in long-context, we can implement more informed research in this area. We call for a careful design of tasks and benchmarks with distinctly long context, taking into account the characteristics that make it qualitatively different from shorter context.

A Comprehensive Survey on Long Context Language Modeling

Efficient processing of long contexts has been a persistent pursuit in Natural Language Processing. With the growing number of long documents, dialogues, and other textual data, it is important to develop Long Context Language Models (LCLMs) that can process and analyze extensive inputs in an effective and efficient way. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on recent advances in long-context modeling for large language models. Our survey is structured around three key aspects: how to obtain effective and efficient LCLMs, how to train and deploy LCLMs efficiently, and how to evaluate and analyze LCLMs comprehensively. For the first aspect, we discuss data strategies, architectural designs, and workflow approaches oriented with long context processing. For the second aspect, we provide a detailed examination of the infrastructure required for LCLM training and inference. For the third aspect, we present evaluation paradigms for long-context comprehension and long-form generation, as well as behavioral analysis and mechanism interpretability of LCLMs. Beyond these three key aspects, we thoroughly explore the diverse application scenarios where existing LCLMs have been deployed and outline promising future development directions. This survey provides an up-to-date review of the literature on long-context LLMs, which we wish to serve as a valuable resource for both researchers and engineers. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at: https://github.com/LCLM-Horizon/A-Comprehensive-Survey-For-Long-Context-Language-Modeling{\color[RGB]{175,36,67}{LCLM-Horizon}}.

Kuaipedia: a Large-scale Multi-modal Short-video Encyclopedia

Online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia, have been well-developed and researched in the last two decades. One can find any attributes or other information of a wiki item on a wiki page edited by a community of volunteers. However, the traditional text, images and tables can hardly express some aspects of an wiki item. For example, when we talk about ``Shiba Inu'', one may care more about ``How to feed it'' or ``How to train it not to protect its food''. Currently, short-video platforms have become a hallmark in the online world. Whether you're on TikTok, Instagram, Kuaishou, or YouTube Shorts, short-video apps have changed how we consume and create content today. Except for producing short videos for entertainment, we can find more and more authors sharing insightful knowledge widely across all walks of life. These short videos, which we call knowledge videos, can easily express any aspects (e.g. hair or how-to-feed) consumers want to know about an item (e.g. Shiba Inu), and they can be systematically analyzed and organized like an online encyclopedia. In this paper, we propose Kuaipedia, a large-scale multi-modal encyclopedia consisting of items, aspects, and short videos lined to them, which was extracted from billions of videos of Kuaishou (Kwai), a well-known short-video platform in China. We first collected items from multiple sources and mined user-centered aspects from millions of users' queries to build an item-aspect tree. Then we propose a new task called ``multi-modal item-aspect linking'' as an expansion of ``entity linking'' to link short videos into item-aspect pairs and build the whole short-video encyclopedia. Intrinsic evaluations show that our encyclopedia is of large scale and highly accurate. We also conduct sufficient extrinsic experiments to show how Kuaipedia can help fundamental applications such as entity typing and entity linking.

A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Research: Systems, Methodologies, and Applications

This survey examines the rapidly evolving field of Deep Research systems -- AI-powered applications that automate complex research workflows through the integration of large language models, advanced information retrieval, and autonomous reasoning capabilities. We analyze more than 80 commercial and non-commercial implementations that have emerged since 2023, including OpenAI/Deep Research, Gemini/Deep Research, Perplexity/Deep Research, and numerous open-source alternatives. Through comprehensive examination, we propose a novel hierarchical taxonomy that categorizes systems according to four fundamental technical dimensions: foundation models and reasoning engines, tool utilization and environmental interaction, task planning and execution control, and knowledge synthesis and output generation. We explore the architectural patterns, implementation approaches, and domain-specific adaptations that characterize these systems across academic, scientific, business, and educational applications. Our analysis reveals both the significant capabilities of current implementations and the technical and ethical challenges they present regarding information accuracy, privacy, intellectual property, and accessibility. The survey concludes by identifying promising research directions in advanced reasoning architectures, multimodal integration, domain specialization, human-AI collaboration, and ecosystem standardization that will likely shape the future evolution of this transformative technology. By providing a comprehensive framework for understanding Deep Research systems, this survey contributes to both the theoretical understanding of AI-augmented knowledge work and the practical development of more capable, responsible, and accessible research technologies. The paper resources can be viewed at https://github.com/scienceaix/deepresearch.

A Systematic Review of Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis: Domains, Methods, and Trends

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained type of sentiment analysis that identifies aspects and their associated opinions from a given text. With the surge of digital opinionated text data, ABSA gained increasing popularity for its ability to mine more detailed and targeted insights. Many review papers on ABSA subtasks and solution methodologies exist, however, few focus on trends over time or systemic issues relating to research application domains, datasets, and solution approaches. To fill the gap, this paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) of ABSA studies with a focus on trends and high-level relationships among these fundamental components. This review is one of the largest SLRs on ABSA. To our knowledge, it is also the first to systematically examine the interrelations among ABSA research and data distribution across domains, as well as trends in solution paradigms and approaches. Our sample includes 727 primary studies screened from 8550 search results without time constraints via an innovative automatic filtering process. Our quantitative analysis not only identifies trends in nearly two decades of ABSA research development but also unveils a systemic lack of dataset and domain diversity as well as domain mismatch that may hinder the development of future ABSA research. We discuss these findings and their implications and propose suggestions for future research.

Knowledge Graph Augmented Network Towards Multiview Representation Learning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained task of sentiment analysis. To better comprehend long complicated sentences and obtain accurate aspect-specific information, linguistic and commonsense knowledge are generally required in this task. However, most current methods employ complicated and inefficient approaches to incorporate external knowledge, e.g., directly searching the graph nodes. Additionally, the complementarity between external knowledge and linguistic information has not been thoroughly studied. To this end, we propose a knowledge graph augmented network KGAN, which aims to effectively incorporate external knowledge with explicitly syntactic and contextual information. In particular, KGAN captures the sentiment feature representations from multiple different perspectives, i.e., context-, syntax- and knowledge-based. First, KGAN learns the contextual and syntactic representations in parallel to fully extract the semantic features. Then, KGAN integrates the knowledge graphs into the embedding space, based on which the aspect-specific knowledge representations are further obtained via an attention mechanism. Last, we propose a hierarchical fusion module to complement these multi-view representations in a local-to-global manner. Extensive experiments on five popular ABSA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our KGAN. Notably, with the help of the pretrained model of RoBERTa, KGAN achieves a new record of state-of-the-art performance among all datasets.

Specialized Document Embeddings for Aspect-based Similarity of Research Papers

Document embeddings and similarity measures underpin content-based recommender systems, whereby a document is commonly represented as a single generic embedding. However, similarity computed on single vector representations provides only one perspective on document similarity that ignores which aspects make two documents alike. To address this limitation, aspect-based similarity measures have been developed using document segmentation or pairwise multi-class document classification. While segmentation harms the document coherence, the pairwise classification approach scales poorly to large scale corpora. In this paper, we treat aspect-based similarity as a classical vector similarity problem in aspect-specific embedding spaces. We represent a document not as a single generic embedding but as multiple specialized embeddings. Our approach avoids document segmentation and scales linearly w.r.t.the corpus size. In an empirical study, we use the Papers with Code corpus containing 157,606 research papers and consider the task, method, and dataset of the respective research papers as their aspects. We compare and analyze three generic document embeddings, six specialized document embeddings and a pairwise classification baseline in the context of research paper recommendations. As generic document embeddings, we consider FastText, SciBERT, and SPECTER. To compute the specialized document embeddings, we compare three alternative methods inspired by retrofitting, fine-tuning, and Siamese networks. In our experiments, Siamese SciBERT achieved the highest scores. Additional analyses indicate an implicit bias of the generic document embeddings towards the dataset aspect and against the method aspect of each research paper. Our approach of aspect-based document embeddings mitigates potential risks arising from implicit biases by making them explicit.

Domain Specialization as the Key to Make Large Language Models Disruptive: A Comprehensive Survey

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of domain data, the sophistication of domain knowledge, the uniqueness of domain objectives, and the diversity of the constraints (e.g., various social norms, cultural conformity, religious beliefs, and ethical standards in the domain applications). Domain specification techniques are key to make large language models disruptive in many applications. Specifically, to solve these hurdles, there has been a notable increase in research and practices conducted in recent years on the domain specialization of LLMs. This emerging field of study, with its substantial potential for impact, necessitates a comprehensive and systematic review to better summarize and guide ongoing work in this area. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on domain specification techniques for large language models, an emerging direction critical for large language model applications. First, we propose a systematic taxonomy that categorizes the LLM domain-specialization techniques based on the accessibility to LLMs and summarizes the framework for all the subcategories as well as their relations and differences to each other. Second, we present an extensive taxonomy of critical application domains that can benefit dramatically from specialized LLMs, discussing their practical significance and open challenges. Last, we offer our insights into the current research status and future trends in this area.

Benchmarking Zero-shot Text Classification: Datasets, Evaluation and Entailment Approach

Zero-shot text classification (0Shot-TC) is a challenging NLU problem to which little attention has been paid by the research community. 0Shot-TC aims to associate an appropriate label with a piece of text, irrespective of the text domain and the aspect (e.g., topic, emotion, event, etc.) described by the label. And there are only a few articles studying 0Shot-TC, all focusing only on topical categorization which, we argue, is just the tip of the iceberg in 0Shot-TC. In addition, the chaotic experiments in literature make no uniform comparison, which blurs the progress. This work benchmarks the 0Shot-TC problem by providing unified datasets, standardized evaluations, and state-of-the-art baselines. Our contributions include: i) The datasets we provide facilitate studying 0Shot-TC relative to conceptually different and diverse aspects: the ``topic'' aspect includes ``sports'' and ``politics'' as labels; the ``emotion'' aspect includes ``joy'' and ``anger''; the ``situation'' aspect includes ``medical assistance'' and ``water shortage''. ii) We extend the existing evaluation setup (label-partially-unseen) -- given a dataset, train on some labels, test on all labels -- to include a more challenging yet realistic evaluation label-fully-unseen 0Shot-TC (Chang et al., 2008), aiming at classifying text snippets without seeing task specific training data at all. iii) We unify the 0Shot-TC of diverse aspects within a textual entailment formulation and study it this way. Code & Data: https://github.com/yinwenpeng/BenchmarkingZeroShot

A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers

Scientific Large Language Models (Sci-LLMs) are transforming how knowledge is represented, integrated, and applied in scientific research, yet their progress is shaped by the complex nature of scientific data. This survey presents a comprehensive, data-centric synthesis that reframes the development of Sci-LLMs as a co-evolution between models and their underlying data substrate. We formulate a unified taxonomy of scientific data and a hierarchical model of scientific knowledge, emphasizing the multimodal, cross-scale, and domain-specific challenges that differentiate scientific corpora from general natural language processing datasets. We systematically review recent Sci-LLMs, from general-purpose foundations to specialized models across diverse scientific disciplines, alongside an extensive analysis of over 270 pre-/post-training datasets, showing why Sci-LLMs pose distinct demands -- heterogeneous, multi-scale, uncertainty-laden corpora that require representations preserving domain invariance and enabling cross-modal reasoning. On evaluation, we examine over 190 benchmark datasets and trace a shift from static exams toward process- and discovery-oriented assessments with advanced evaluation protocols. These data-centric analyses highlight persistent issues in scientific data development and discuss emerging solutions involving semi-automated annotation pipelines and expert validation. Finally, we outline a paradigm shift toward closed-loop systems where autonomous agents based on Sci-LLMs actively experiment, validate, and contribute to a living, evolving knowledge base. Collectively, this work provides a roadmap for building trustworthy, continually evolving artificial intelligence (AI) systems that function as a true partner in accelerating scientific discovery.

RichRAG: Crafting Rich Responses for Multi-faceted Queries in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) effectively addresses issues of static knowledge and hallucination in large language models. Existing studies mostly focus on question scenarios with clear user intents and concise answers. However, it is prevalent that users issue broad, open-ended queries with diverse sub-intents, for which they desire rich and long-form answers covering multiple relevant aspects. To tackle this important yet underexplored problem, we propose a novel RAG framework, namely RichRAG. It includes a sub-aspect explorer to identify potential sub-aspects of input questions, a multi-faceted retriever to build a candidate pool of diverse external documents related to these sub-aspects, and a generative list-wise ranker, which is a key module to provide the top-k most valuable documents for the final generator. These ranked documents sufficiently cover various query aspects and are aware of the generator's preferences, hence incentivizing it to produce rich and comprehensive responses for users. The training of our ranker involves a supervised fine-tuning stage to ensure the basic coverage of documents, and a reinforcement learning stage to align downstream LLM's preferences to the ranking of documents. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets prove that our framework effectively and efficiently provides comprehensive and satisfying responses to users.

Introducing Three New Benchmark Datasets for Hierarchical Text Classification

Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) is a natural language processing task with the objective to classify text documents into a set of classes from a structured class hierarchy. Many HTC approaches have been proposed which attempt to leverage the class hierarchy information in various ways to improve classification performance. Machine learning-based classification approaches require large amounts of training data and are most-commonly compared through three established benchmark datasets, which include the Web Of Science (WOS), Reuters Corpus Volume 1 Version 2 (RCV1-V2) and New York Times (NYT) datasets. However, apart from the RCV1-V2 dataset which is well-documented, these datasets are not accompanied with detailed description methodologies. In this paper, we introduce three new HTC benchmark datasets in the domain of research publications which comprise the titles and abstracts of papers from the Web of Science publication database. We first create two baseline datasets which use existing journal-and citation-based classification schemas. Due to the respective shortcomings of these two existing schemas, we propose an approach which combines their classifications to improve the reliability and robustness of the dataset. We evaluate the three created datasets with a clustering-based analysis and show that our proposed approach results in a higher quality dataset where documents that belong to the same class are semantically more similar compared to the other datasets. Finally, we provide the classification performance of four state-of-the-art HTC approaches on these three new datasets to provide baselines for future studies on machine learning-based techniques for scientific publication classification.

TONE: A 3-Tiered ONtology for Emotion analysis

Emotions have played an important part in many sectors, including psychology, medicine, mental health, computer science, and so on, and categorizing them has proven extremely useful in separating one emotion from another. Emotions can be classified using the following two methods: (1) The supervised method's efficiency is strongly dependent on the size and domain of the data collected. A categorization established using relevant data from one domain may not work well in another. (2) An unsupervised method that uses either domain expertise or a knowledge base of emotion types already exists. Though this second approach provides a suitable and generic categorization of emotions and is cost-effective, the literature doesn't possess a publicly available knowledge base that can be directly applied to any emotion categorization-related task. This pushes us to create a knowledge base that can be used for emotion classification across domains, and ontology is often used for this purpose. In this study, we provide TONE, an emotion-based ontology that effectively creates an emotional hierarchy based on Dr. Gerrod Parrot's group of emotions. In addition to ontology development, we introduce a semi-automated vocabulary construction process to generate a detailed collection of terms for emotions at each tier of the hierarchy. We also demonstrate automated methods for establishing three sorts of dependencies in order to develop linkages between different emotions. Our human and automatic evaluation results show the ontology's quality. Furthermore, we describe three distinct use cases that demonstrate the applicability of our ontology.

TACAM: Topic And Context Aware Argument Mining

In this work we address the problem of argument search. The purpose of argument search is the distillation of pro and contra arguments for requested topics from large text corpora. In previous works, the usual approach is to use a standard search engine to extract text parts which are relevant to the given topic and subsequently use an argument recognition algorithm to select arguments from them. The main challenge in the argument recognition task, which is also known as argument mining, is that often sentences containing arguments are structurally similar to purely informative sentences without any stance about the topic. In fact, they only differ semantically. Most approaches use topic or search term information only for the first search step and therefore assume that arguments can be classified independently of a topic. We argue that topic information is crucial for argument mining, since the topic defines the semantic context of an argument. Precisely, we propose different models for the classification of arguments, which take information about a topic of an argument into account. Moreover, to enrich the context of a topic and to let models understand the context of the potential argument better, we integrate information from different external sources such as Knowledge Graphs or pre-trained NLP models. Our evaluation shows that considering topic information, especially in connection with external information, provides a significant performance boost for the argument mining task.

Structural Text Segmentation of Legal Documents

The growing complexity of legal cases has lead to an increasing interest in legal information retrieval systems that can effectively satisfy user-specific information needs. However, such downstream systems typically require documents to be properly formatted and segmented, which is often done with relatively simple pre-processing steps, disregarding topical coherence of segments. Systems generally rely on representations of individual sentences or paragraphs, which may lack crucial context, or document-level representations, which are too long for meaningful search results. To address this issue, we propose a segmentation system that can predict topical coherence of sequential text segments spanning several paragraphs, effectively segmenting a document and providing a more balanced representation for downstream applications. We build our model on top of popular transformer networks and formulate structural text segmentation as topical change detection, by performing a series of independent classifications that allow for efficient fine-tuning on task-specific data. We crawl a novel dataset consisting of roughly 74,000 online Terms-of-Service documents, including hierarchical topic annotations, which we use for training. Results show that our proposed system significantly outperforms baselines, and adapts well to structural peculiarities of legal documents. We release both data and trained models to the research community for future work.https://github.com/dennlinger/TopicalChange

A Survey on Mixture of Experts

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered unprecedented advancements across diverse fields, ranging from natural language processing to computer vision and beyond. The prowess of LLMs is underpinned by their substantial model size, extensive and diverse datasets, and the vast computational power harnessed during training, all of which contribute to the emergent abilities of LLMs (e.g., in-context learning) that are not present in small models. Within this context, the mixture of experts (MoE) has emerged as an effective method for substantially scaling up model capacity with minimal computation overhead, gaining significant attention from academia and industry. Despite its growing prevalence, there lacks a systematic and comprehensive review of the literature on MoE. This survey seeks to bridge that gap, serving as an essential resource for researchers delving into the intricacies of MoE. We first briefly introduce the structure of the MoE layer, followed by proposing a new taxonomy of MoE. Next, we overview the core designs for various MoE models including both algorithmic and systemic aspects, alongside collections of available open-source implementations, hyperparameter configurations and empirical evaluations. Furthermore, we delineate the multifaceted applications of MoE in practice, and outline some potential directions for future research. To facilitate ongoing updates and the sharing of cutting-edge developments in MoE research, we have established a resource repository accessible at https://github.com/withinmiaov/A-Survey-on-Mixture-of-Experts.

A Survey of Context Engineering for Large Language Models

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is fundamentally determined by the contextual information provided during inference. This survey introduces Context Engineering, a formal discipline that transcends simple prompt design to encompass the systematic optimization of information payloads for LLMs. We present a comprehensive taxonomy decomposing Context Engineering into its foundational components and the sophisticated implementations that integrate them into intelligent systems. We first examine the foundational components: context retrieval and generation, context processing and context management. We then explore how these components are architecturally integrated to create sophisticated system implementations: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), memory systems and tool-integrated reasoning, and multi-agent systems. Through this systematic analysis of over 1300 research papers, our survey not only establishes a technical roadmap for the field but also reveals a critical research gap: a fundamental asymmetry exists between model capabilities. While current models, augmented by advanced context engineering, demonstrate remarkable proficiency in understanding complex contexts, they exhibit pronounced limitations in generating equally sophisticated, long-form outputs. Addressing this gap is a defining priority for future research. Ultimately, this survey provides a unified framework for both researchers and engineers advancing context-aware AI.

CoAScore: Chain-of-Aspects Prompting for NLG Evaluation

Recently, natural language generation (NLG) evaluation has shifted from a single-aspect to a multi-aspect paradigm, allowing for a more accurate assessment. Large language models (LLMs) achieve superior performance on various NLG evaluation tasks. However, current work often employs the LLM to independently evaluate different aspects, which largely ignores the rich correlation between various aspects. To fill this research gap, in this work, we propose an NLG evaluation metric called CoAScore. Powered by LLMs, the CoAScore utilizes multi-aspect knowledge through a CoA (Chain-of-Aspects) prompting framework when assessing the quality of a certain aspect. Specifically, for a given aspect to evaluate, we first prompt the LLM to generate a chain of aspects that are relevant to the target aspect and could be useful for the evaluation. We then collect evaluation scores for each generated aspect, and finally, leverage the knowledge of these aspects to improve the evaluation of the target aspect. We evaluate CoAScore across five NLG evaluation tasks (e.g., summarization, dialog response generation, etc) and nine aspects (e.g., overall quality, relevance, coherence, etc). Our experimental findings highlight that, in comparison to individual aspect evaluation, CoAScore exhibits a higher correlation with human judgments. This improvement significantly outperforms existing unsupervised evaluation metrics, whether for assessing overall quality or other aspects. We also conducted extensive ablation studies to validate the effectiveness of the three stages within the CoAScore framework and conducted case studies to show how the LLM performs in these stages. Our code and scripts are available.

Removing Non-Stationary Knowledge From Pre-Trained Language Models for Entity-Level Sentiment Classification in Finance

Extraction of sentiment signals from news text, stock message boards, and business reports, for stock movement prediction, has been a rising field of interest in finance. Building upon past literature, the most recent works attempt to better capture sentiment from sentences with complex syntactic structures by introducing aspect-level sentiment classification (ASC). Despite the growing interest, however, fine-grained sentiment analysis has not been fully explored in non-English literature due to the shortage of annotated finance-specific data. Accordingly, it is necessary for non-English languages to leverage datasets and pre-trained language models (PLM) of different domains, languages, and tasks to best their performance. To facilitate finance-specific ASC research in the Korean language, we build KorFinASC, a Korean aspect-level sentiment classification dataset for finance consisting of 12,613 human-annotated samples, and explore methods of intermediate transfer learning. Our experiments indicate that past research has been ignorant towards the potentially wrong knowledge of financial entities encoded during the training phase, which has overestimated the predictive power of PLMs. In our work, we use the term "non-stationary knowledge'' to refer to information that was previously correct but is likely to change, and present "TGT-Masking'', a novel masking pattern to restrict PLMs from speculating knowledge of the kind. Finally, through a series of transfer learning with TGT-Masking applied we improve 22.63% of classification accuracy compared to standalone models on KorFinASC.

Knowing What, How and Why: A Near Complete Solution for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Target-based sentiment analysis or aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) refers to addressing various sentiment analysis tasks at a fine-grained level, which includes but is not limited to aspect extraction, aspect sentiment classification, and opinion extraction. There exist many solvers of the above individual subtasks or a combination of two subtasks, and they can work together to tell a complete story, i.e. the discussed aspect, the sentiment on it, and the cause of the sentiment. However, no previous ABSA research tried to provide a complete solution in one shot. In this paper, we introduce a new subtask under ABSA, named aspect sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE). Particularly, a solver of this task needs to extract triplets (What, How, Why) from the inputs, which show WHAT the targeted aspects are, HOW their sentiment polarities are and WHY they have such polarities (i.e. opinion reasons). For instance, one triplet from "Waiters are very friendly and the pasta is simply average" could be ('Waiters', positive, 'friendly'). We propose a two-stage framework to address this task. The first stage predicts what, how and why in a unified model, and then the second stage pairs up the predicted what (how) and why from the first stage to output triplets. In the experiments, our framework has set a benchmark performance in this novel triplet extraction task. Meanwhile, it outperforms a few strong baselines adapted from state-of-the-art related methods.

PanoSent: A Panoptic Sextuple Extraction Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

While existing Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has received extensive effort and advancement, there are still gaps in defining a more holistic research target seamlessly integrating multimodality, conversation context, fine-granularity, and also covering the changing sentiment dynamics as well as cognitive causal rationales. This paper bridges the gaps by introducing a multimodal conversational ABSA, where two novel subtasks are proposed: 1) Panoptic Sentiment Sextuple Extraction, panoramically recognizing holder, target, aspect, opinion, sentiment, rationale from multi-turn multi-party multimodal dialogue. 2) Sentiment Flipping Analysis, detecting the dynamic sentiment transformation throughout the conversation with the causal reasons. To benchmark the tasks, we construct PanoSent, a dataset annotated both manually and automatically, featuring high quality, large scale, multimodality, multilingualism, multi-scenarios, and covering both implicit and explicit sentiment elements. To effectively address the tasks, we devise a novel Chain-of-Sentiment reasoning framework, together with a novel multimodal large language model (namely Sentica) and a paraphrase-based verification mechanism. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our methods over strong baselines, validating the efficacy of all our proposed methods. The work is expected to open up a new era for the ABSA community, and thus all our codes and data are open at https://PanoSent.github.io/

Carbon and Silicon, Coexist or Compete? A Survey on Human-AI Interactions in Agent-based Modeling and Simulation

Recent interest in human-AI interactions in agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) has grown rapidly due to the widespread utilization of large language models (LLMs). ABMS is an intelligent approach that simulates autonomous agents' behaviors within a defined environment to research emergent phenomena. Integrating LLMs into ABMS enables natural language interaction between humans and models. Meanwhile, it introduces new challenges that rely on human interaction to address. Human involvement can assist ABMS in adapting to flexible and complex research demands. However, systematic reviews of interactions that examine how humans and AI interact in ABMS are lacking. In this paper, we investigate existing works and propose a novel taxonomy to categorize the interactions derived from them. Specifically, human users refer to researchers who utilize ABMS tools to conduct their studies in our survey. We decompose interactions into five dimensions: the goals that users want to achieve (Why), the phases that users are involved (When), the components of the system (What), the roles of users (Who), and the means of interactions (How). Our analysis summarizes the findings that reveal existing interaction patterns. They provide researchers who develop interactions with comprehensive guidance on how humans and AI interact. We further discuss the unexplored interactions and suggest future research directions.

EcoVerse: An Annotated Twitter Dataset for Eco-Relevance Classification, Environmental Impact Analysis, and Stance Detection

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.

Towards Systematic Monolingual NLP Surveys: GenA of Greek NLP

Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has traditionally been predominantly focused on English, driven by the availability of resources, the size of the research community, and market demands. Recently, there has been a noticeable shift towards multilingualism in NLP, recognizing the need for inclusivity and effectiveness across diverse languages and cultures. Monolingual surveys have the potential to complement the broader trend towards multilingualism in NLP by providing foundational insights and resources, necessary for effectively addressing the linguistic diversity of global communication. However, monolingual NLP surveys are extremely rare in the literature. This study introduces a generalizable methodology for creating systematic and comprehensive monolingual NLP surveys, aimed at optimizing the process of constructing such surveys and thoroughly addressing a language's NLP support. Our approach integrates a structured search protocol to avoid selection bias and ensure reproducibility, an NLP task taxonomy to organize the surveyed material coherently, and language resources (LRs) taxonomies to identify potential benchmarks and highlight opportunities for improving resource availability (e.g., through better maintenance or licensing). We apply this methodology to Greek NLP (2012-2023), providing a comprehensive overview of its current state and challenges. We discuss the progress of Greek NLP and outline the Greek LRs found, classified by availability and usability, assessing language support per NLP task. The presented systematic literature review of Greek NLP serves as an application of our method that showcases the benefits of monolingual NLP surveys more broadly. Similar applications could be considered for the myriads of languages whose progress in NLP lags behind that of well-supported languages.

Heterogeneous LLM Methods for Ontology Learning (Few-Shot Prompting, Ensemble Typing, and Attention-Based Taxonomies)

We present a comprehensive system for addressing Tasks A, B, and C of the LLMs4OL 2025 challenge, which together span the full ontology construction pipeline: term extraction, typing, and taxonomy discovery. Our approach combines retrieval-augmented prompting, zero-shot classification, and attention-based graph modeling -- each tailored to the demands of the respective task. For Task A, we jointly extract domain-specific terms and their ontological types using a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline. Training data was reformulated into a document to terms and types correspondence, while test-time inference leverages semantically similar training examples. This single-pass method requires no model finetuning and improves overall performance through lexical augmentation Task B, which involves assigning types to given terms, is handled via a dual strategy. In the few-shot setting (for domains with labeled training data), we reuse the RAG scheme with few-shot prompting. In the zero-shot setting (for previously unseen domains), we use a zero-shot classifier that combines cosine similarity scores from multiple embedding models using confidence-based weighting. In Task C, we model taxonomy discovery as graph inference. Using embeddings of type labels, we train a lightweight cross-attention layer to predict is-a relations by approximating a soft adjacency matrix. These modular, task-specific solutions enabled us to achieve top-ranking results in the official leaderboard across all three tasks. Taken together these strategies showcase the scalability, adaptability, and robustness of LLM-based architectures for ontology learning across heterogeneous domains. Code is available at: https://github.com/BelyaevaAlex/LLMs4OL-Challenge-Alexbek

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Modeling User Novelty-Seeking Intent in Recommender Systems

Recommending novel content, which expands user horizons by introducing them to new interests, has been shown to improve users' long-term experience on recommendation platforms chen2021values. Users however are not constantly looking to explore novel content. It is therefore crucial to understand their novelty-seeking intent and adjust the recommendation policy accordingly. Most existing literature models a user's propensity to choose novel content or to prefer a more diverse set of recommendations at individual interactions. Hierarchical structure, on the other hand, exists in a user's novelty-seeking intent, which is manifested as a static and intrinsic user preference for seeking novelty along with a dynamic session-based propensity. To this end, we propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning-based method to model the hierarchical user novelty-seeking intent, and to adapt the recommendation policy accordingly based on the extracted user novelty-seeking propensity. We further incorporate diversity and novelty-related measurement in the reward function of the hierarchical RL (HRL) agent to encourage user exploration chen2021values. We demonstrate the benefits of explicitly modeling hierarchical user novelty-seeking intent in recommendations through extensive experiments on simulated and real-world datasets. In particular, we demonstrate that the effectiveness of our proposed hierarchical RL-based method lies in its ability to capture such hierarchically-structured intent. As a result, the proposed HRL model achieves superior performance on several public datasets, compared with state-of-art baselines.

Hierarchical Pretraining for Biomedical Term Embeddings

Electronic health records (EHR) contain narrative notes that provide extensive details on the medical condition and management of patients. Natural language processing (NLP) of clinical notes can use observed frequencies of clinical terms as predictive features for downstream applications such as clinical decision making and patient trajectory prediction. However, due to the vast number of highly similar and related clinical concepts, a more effective modeling strategy is to represent clinical terms as semantic embeddings via representation learning and use the low dimensional embeddings as feature vectors for predictive modeling. To achieve efficient representation, fine-tuning pretrained language models with biomedical knowledge graphs may generate better embeddings for biomedical terms than those from standard language models alone. These embeddings can effectively discriminate synonymous pairs of from those that are unrelated. However, they often fail to capture different degrees of similarity or relatedness for concepts that are hierarchical in nature. To overcome this limitation, we propose HiPrBERT, a novel biomedical term representation model trained on additionally complied data that contains hierarchical structures for various biomedical terms. We modify an existing contrastive loss function to extract information from these hierarchies. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that HiPrBERT effectively learns the pair-wise distance from hierarchical information, resulting in a substantially more informative embeddings for further biomedical applications

ECtHR-PCR: A Dataset for Precedent Understanding and Prior Case Retrieval in the European Court of Human Rights

In common law jurisdictions, legal practitioners rely on precedents to construct arguments, in line with the doctrine of stare decisis. As the number of cases grow over the years, prior case retrieval (PCR) has garnered significant attention. Besides lacking real-world scale, existing PCR datasets do not simulate a realistic setting, because their queries use complete case documents while only masking references to prior cases. The query is thereby exposed to legal reasoning not yet available when constructing an argument for an undecided case as well as spurious patterns left behind by citation masks, potentially short-circuiting a comprehensive understanding of case facts and legal principles. To address these limitations, we introduce a PCR dataset based on judgements from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), which explicitly separate facts from arguments and exhibit precedential practices, aiding us to develop this PCR dataset to foster systems' comprehensive understanding. We benchmark different lexical and dense retrieval approaches with various negative sampling strategies, adapting them to deal with long text sequences using hierarchical variants. We found that difficulty-based negative sampling strategies were not effective for the PCR task, highlighting the need for investigation into domain-specific difficulty criteria. Furthermore, we observe performance of the dense models degrade with time and calls for further research into temporal adaptation of retrieval models. Additionally, we assess the influence of different views , Halsbury's and Goodhart's, in practice in ECtHR jurisdiction using PCR task.

How to Handle Different Types of Out-of-Distribution Scenarios in Computational Argumentation? A Comprehensive and Fine-Grained Field Study

The advent of pre-trained Language Models (LMs) has markedly advanced natural language processing, but their efficacy in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios remains a significant challenge. Computational argumentation (CA), modeling human argumentation processes, is a field notably impacted by these challenges because complex annotation schemes and high annotation costs naturally lead to resources barely covering the multiplicity of available text sources and topics. Due to this data scarcity, generalization to data from uncovered covariant distributions is a common challenge for CA tasks like stance detection or argument classification. This work systematically assesses LMs' capabilities for such OOD scenarios. While previous work targets specific OOD types like topic shifts or OOD uniformly, we address three prevalent OOD scenarios in CA: topic shift, domain shift, and language shift. Our findings challenge the previously asserted general superiority of in-context learning (ICL) for OOD. We find that the efficacy of such learning paradigms varies with the type of OOD. Specifically, while ICL excels for domain shifts, prompt-based fine-tuning surpasses for topic shifts. To sum up, we navigate the heterogeneity of OOD scenarios in CA and empirically underscore the potential of base-sized LMs in overcoming these challenges.

Doing More with Less -- Implementing Routing Strategies in Large Language Model-Based Systems: An Extended Survey

Large Language Models (LLM)-based systems, i.e. interconnected elements that include an LLM as a central component (e.g., conversational agents), are typically monolithic static architectures that rely on a single LLM for all user queries. However, they often require different preprocessing strategies, levels of reasoning, or knowledge. Generalist LLMs (i.e. GPT-4), trained on very large multi-topic corpora, can perform well in a variety of tasks. However, they require significant financial, energy, and hardware resources that may not be justified for basic tasks. This implies potentially investing in unnecessary costs for a given query. To overcome this problem, a routing mechanism routes user queries to the most suitable components, such as smaller LLMs or experts in specific topics. This approach may improve response quality while minimising costs. Routing can be expanded to other components of the conversational agent architecture, such as the selection of optimal embedding strategies. This paper explores key considerations for integrating routing into LLM-based systems, focusing on resource management, cost definition, and strategy selection. Our main contributions include a formalisation of the problem, a novel taxonomy of existing approaches emphasising relevance and resource efficiency, and a comparative analysis of these strategies in relation to industry practices. Finally, we identify critical challenges and directions for future research.

MASSW: A New Dataset and Benchmark Tasks for AI-Assisted Scientific Workflows

Scientific innovation relies on detailed workflows, which include critical steps such as analyzing literature, generating ideas, validating these ideas, interpreting results, and inspiring follow-up research. However, scientific publications that document these workflows are extensive and unstructured. This makes it difficult for both human researchers and AI systems to effectively navigate and explore the space of scientific innovation. To address this issue, we introduce MASSW, a comprehensive text dataset on Multi-Aspect Summarization of Scientific Workflows. MASSW includes more than 152,000 peer-reviewed publications from 17 leading computer science conferences spanning the past 50 years. Using Large Language Models (LLMs), we automatically extract five core aspects from these publications -- context, key idea, method, outcome, and projected impact -- which correspond to five key steps in the research workflow. These structured summaries facilitate a variety of downstream tasks and analyses. The quality of the LLM-extracted summaries is validated by comparing them with human annotations. We demonstrate the utility of MASSW through multiple novel machine-learning tasks that can be benchmarked using this new dataset, which make various types of predictions and recommendations along the scientific workflow. MASSW holds significant potential for researchers to create and benchmark new AI methods for optimizing scientific workflows and fostering scientific innovation in the field. Our dataset is openly available at https://github.com/xingjian-zhang/massw.

Towards Next-Generation LLM-based Recommender Systems: A Survey and Beyond

Large language models (LLMs) have not only revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP) but also have the potential to bring a paradigm shift in many other fields due to their remarkable abilities of language understanding, as well as impressive generalization capabilities and reasoning skills. As a result, recent studies have actively attempted to harness the power of LLMs to improve recommender systems, and it is imperative to thoroughly review the recent advances and challenges of LLM-based recommender systems. Unlike existing work, this survey does not merely analyze the classifications of LLM-based recommendation systems according to the technical framework of LLMs. Instead, it investigates how LLMs can better serve recommendation tasks from the perspective of the recommender system community, thus enhancing the integration of large language models into the research of recommender system and its practical application. In addition, the long-standing gap between academic research and industrial applications related to recommender systems has not been well discussed, especially in the era of large language models. In this review, we introduce a novel taxonomy that originates from the intrinsic essence of recommendation, delving into the application of large language model-based recommendation systems and their industrial implementation. Specifically, we propose a three-tier structure that more accurately reflects the developmental progression of recommendation systems from research to practical implementation, including representing and understanding, scheming and utilizing, and industrial deployment. Furthermore, we discuss critical challenges and opportunities in this emerging field. A more up-to-date version of the papers is maintained at: https://github.com/jindongli-Ai/Next-Generation-LLM-based-Recommender-Systems-Survey.

EduRABSA: An Education Review Dataset for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Tasks

Every year, most educational institutions seek and receive an enormous volume of text feedback from students on courses, teaching, and overall experience. Yet, turning this raw feedback into useful insights is far from straightforward. It has been a long-standing challenge to adopt automatic opinion mining solutions for such education review text data due to the content complexity and low-granularity reporting requirements. Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) offers a promising solution with its rich, sub-sentence-level opinion mining capabilities. However, existing ABSA research and resources are very heavily focused on the commercial domain. In education, they are scarce and hard to develop due to limited public datasets and strict data protection. A high-quality, annotated dataset is urgently needed to advance research in this under-resourced area. In this work, we present EduRABSA (Education Review ABSA), the first public, annotated ABSA education review dataset that covers three review subject types (course, teaching staff, university) in the English language and all main ABSA tasks, including the under-explored implicit aspect and implicit opinion extraction. We also share ASQE-DPT (Data Processing Tool), an offline, lightweight, installation-free manual data annotation tool that generates labelled datasets for comprehensive ABSA tasks from a single-task annotation. Together, these resources contribute to the ABSA community and education domain by removing the dataset barrier, supporting research transparency and reproducibility, and enabling the creation and sharing of further resources. The dataset, annotation tool, and scripts and statistics for dataset processing and sampling are available at https://github.com/yhua219/edurabsa_dataset_and_annotation_tool.

Graph Prompt Learning: A Comprehensive Survey and Beyond

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has revolutionized numerous fields, yet its integration with graph data, a cornerstone in our interconnected world, remains nascent. This paper presents a pioneering survey on the emerging domain of graph prompts in AGI, addressing key challenges and opportunities in harnessing graph data for AGI applications. Despite substantial advancements in AGI across natural language processing and computer vision, the application to graph data is relatively underexplored. This survey critically evaluates the current landscape of AGI in handling graph data, highlighting the distinct challenges in cross-modality, cross-domain, and cross-task applications specific to graphs. Our work is the first to propose a unified framework for understanding graph prompt learning, offering clarity on prompt tokens, token structures, and insertion patterns in the graph domain. We delve into the intrinsic properties of graph prompts, exploring their flexibility, expressiveness, and interplay with existing graph models. A comprehensive taxonomy categorizes over 100 works in this field, aligning them with pre-training tasks across node-level, edge-level, and graph-level objectives. Additionally, we present, ProG, a Python library, and an accompanying website, to support and advance research in graph prompting. The survey culminates in a discussion of current challenges and future directions, offering a roadmap for research in graph prompting within AGI. Through this comprehensive analysis, we aim to catalyze further exploration and practical applications of AGI in graph data, underlining its potential to reshape AGI fields and beyond. ProG and the website can be accessed by https://github.com/WxxShirley/Awesome-Graph-Prompt, and https://github.com/sheldonresearch/ProG, respectively.

Fairness Definitions in Language Models Explained

Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Despite these advancements, LMs can inherit and amplify societal biases related to sensitive attributes such as gender and race, limiting their adoption in real-world applications. Therefore, fairness has been extensively explored in LMs, leading to the proposal of various fairness notions. However, the lack of clear agreement on which fairness definition to apply in specific contexts (e.g., medium-sized LMs versus large-sized LMs) and the complexity of understanding the distinctions between these definitions can create confusion and impede further progress. To this end, this paper proposes a systematic survey that clarifies the definitions of fairness as they apply to LMs. Specifically, we begin with a brief introduction to LMs and fairness in LMs, followed by a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of existing fairness notions in LMs and the introduction of a novel taxonomy that categorizes these concepts based on their foundational principles and operational distinctions. We further illustrate each definition through experiments, showcasing their practical implications and outcomes. Finally, we discuss current research challenges and open questions, aiming to foster innovative ideas and advance the field. The implementation and additional resources are publicly available at https://github.com/LavinWong/Fairness-in-Large-Language-Models/tree/main/definitions.

Towards Lifelong Learning of Large Language Models: A Survey

As the applications of large language models (LLMs) expand across diverse fields, the ability of these models to adapt to ongoing changes in data, tasks, and user preferences becomes crucial. Traditional training methods, relying on static datasets, are increasingly inadequate for coping with the dynamic nature of real-world information. Lifelong learning, also known as continual or incremental learning, addresses this challenge by enabling LLMs to learn continuously and adaptively over their operational lifetime, integrating new knowledge while retaining previously learned information and preventing catastrophic forgetting. This survey delves into the sophisticated landscape of lifelong learning, categorizing strategies into two primary groups: Internal Knowledge and External Knowledge. Internal Knowledge includes continual pretraining and continual finetuning, each enhancing the adaptability of LLMs in various scenarios. External Knowledge encompasses retrieval-based and tool-based lifelong learning, leveraging external data sources and computational tools to extend the model's capabilities without modifying core parameters. The key contributions of our survey are: (1) Introducing a novel taxonomy categorizing the extensive literature of lifelong learning into 12 scenarios; (2) Identifying common techniques across all lifelong learning scenarios and classifying existing literature into various technique groups within each scenario; (3) Highlighting emerging techniques such as model expansion and data selection, which were less explored in the pre-LLM era. Through a detailed examination of these groups and their respective categories, this survey aims to enhance the adaptability, reliability, and overall performance of LLMs in real-world applications.

Harnessing Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Question Answering via Adaptive Multi-Aspect Retrieval-Augmentation

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities, yet struggle with hallucination and outdated knowledge when tasked with complex knowledge reasoning, resulting in factually incorrect outputs. Previous studies have attempted to mitigate it by retrieving factual knowledge from large-scale knowledge graphs (KGs) to assist LLMs in logical reasoning and prediction of answers. However, this kind of approach often introduces noise and irrelevant data, especially in situations with extensive context from multiple knowledge aspects. In this way, LLM attention can be potentially mislead from question and relevant information. In our study, we introduce an Adaptive Multi-Aspect Retrieval-augmented over KGs (Amar) framework. This method retrieves knowledge including entities, relations, and subgraphs, and converts each piece of retrieved text into prompt embeddings. The Amar framework comprises two key sub-components: 1) a self-alignment module that aligns commonalities among entities, relations, and subgraphs to enhance retrieved text, thereby reducing noise interference; 2) a relevance gating module that employs a soft gate to learn the relevance score between question and multi-aspect retrieved data, to determine which information should be used to enhance LLMs' output, or even filtered altogether. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance on two common datasets, WebQSP and CWQ, showing a 1.9\% improvement in accuracy over its best competitor and a 6.6\% improvement in logical form generation over a method that directly uses retrieved text as context prompts. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of Amar in improving the reasoning of LLMs.

A Comprehensive Survey of Hallucination Mitigation Techniques in Large Language Models

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance in their ability to write human-like text, a key challenge remains around their tendency to hallucinate generating content that appears factual but is ungrounded. This issue of hallucination is arguably the biggest hindrance to safely deploying these powerful LLMs into real-world production systems that impact people's lives. The journey toward widespread adoption of LLMs in practical settings heavily relies on addressing and mitigating hallucinations. Unlike traditional AI systems focused on limited tasks, LLMs have been exposed to vast amounts of online text data during training. While this allows them to display impressive language fluency, it also means they are capable of extrapolating information from the biases in training data, misinterpreting ambiguous prompts, or modifying the information to align superficially with the input. This becomes hugely alarming when we rely on language generation capabilities for sensitive applications, such as summarizing medical records, financial analysis reports, etc. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of over 32 techniques developed to mitigate hallucination in LLMs. Notable among these are Retrieval Augmented Generation (Lewis et al, 2021), Knowledge Retrieval (Varshney et al,2023), CoNLI (Lei et al, 2023), and CoVe (Dhuliawala et al, 2023). Furthermore, we introduce a detailed taxonomy categorizing these methods based on various parameters, such as dataset utilization, common tasks, feedback mechanisms, and retriever types. This classification helps distinguish the diverse approaches specifically designed to tackle hallucination issues in LLMs. Additionally, we analyze the challenges and limitations inherent in these techniques, providing a solid foundation for future research in addressing hallucinations and related phenomena within the realm of LLMs.