Semantic Parsing by Large Language Models for Intricate Updating Strategies of Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking

Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracking (DST) addresses the challenge of acquiring and annotating task-oriented dialogues, which can be time-consuming and costly. However, DST extends beyond simple slot-filling and requires effective updating strategies for tracking dialogue state as conversations progress. In this paper, we propose ParsingDST, a new In-Context Learning (ICL) method, to introduce additional intricate updating strategies in zero-shot DST. Our approach reformulates the DST task by leveraging powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) and translating the original dialogue text to JSON through semantic parsing as an intermediate state. We also design a novel framework that includes more modules to ensure the effectiveness of updating strategies in the text-to-JSON process. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing zero-shot DST methods on MultiWOZ, exhibiting significant improvements in Joint Goal Accuracy (JGA) and slot accuracy compared to existing ICL methods. Our code has been released.Comment: Accepted to the Findings of EMNLP 2023 (Short Paper

Data augmentation and semi-supervised learning for deep neural networks-based text classifier

User feedback is essential for understanding user needs. In this paper, we use free-text obtained from a survey on sleep-related issues to build a deep neural networks-based text classifier. However, to train the deep neural networks model, a lot of labelled data is needed. To reduce manual data labelling, we propose a method which is a combination of data augmentation and pseudo-labelling: data augmentation is applied to labelled data to increase the size of the initial train set and then the trained model is used to annotate unlabelled data with pseudo-labels. The result shows that the model with the data augmentation achieves macro-averaged f1 score of 65.2% while using 4,300 training data, whereas the model without data augmentation achieves macro-averaged f1 score of 68.2% with around 14,000 training data. Furthermore, with the combination of pseudo-labelling, the model achieves macro-averaged f1 score of 62.7% with only using 1,400 training data with labels. In other words, with the proposed method we can reduce the amount of labelled data for training while achieving relatively good performance

SimuQ: A Framework for Programming Quantum Hamiltonian Simulation with Analog Compilation

Quantum Hamiltonian simulation, which simulates the evolution of quantum systems and probes quantum phenomena, is one of the most promising applications of quantum computing. Recent experimental results suggest that Hamiltonian-oriented analog quantum simulation would be advantageous over circuit-oriented digital quantum simulation in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) machine era. However, programming analog quantum simulators is much more challenging due to the lack of a unified interface between hardware and software. In this paper, we design and implement SimuQ, the first framework for quantum Hamiltonian simulation that supports Hamiltonian programming and pulse-level compilation to heterogeneous analog quantum simulators. Specifically, in SimuQ, front-end users specify the target quantum system with Hamiltonian Modeling Language, and the Hamiltonian-level programmability of analog quantum simulators is specified through a new abstraction called the abstract analog instruction set (AAIS) and programmed in AAIS Specification Language by hardware providers. Through a solver-based compilation, SimuQ generates executable pulse schedules for real devices to simulate the evolution of desired quantum systems, which is demonstrated on superconducting (IBM), neutral-atom (QuEra), and trapped-ion (IonQ) quantum devices. Moreover, we demonstrate the advantages of exposing the Hamiltonian-level programmability of devices with native operations or interaction-based gates and establish a small benchmark of quantum simulation to evaluate SimuQ's compiler with the above analog quantum simulators.Comment: 34 pages, 15 figures, 3 tables. Appears in POPL 2024. The code is available at https://github.com/PicksPeng/SimuQ. A website is available at https://pickspeng.github.io/SimuQ

Training Adaptive Computation for Open-Domain Question Answering with Computational Constraints

Adaptive Computation (AC) has been shown to be effective in improving the efficiency of Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) systems. However, current AC approaches require tuning of all model parameters, and training state-of-the-art ODQA models requires significant computational resources that may not be available for most researchers. We propose Adaptive Passage Encoder, an AC method that can be applied to an existing ODQA model and can be trained efficiently on a single GPU. It keeps the parameters of the base ODQA model fixed, but it overrides the default layer-by-layer computation of the encoder with an AC policy that is trained to optimise the computational efficiency of the model. Our experimental results show that our method improves upon a state-of-the-art model on two datasets, and is also more accurate than previous AC methods due to the stronger base ODQA model. All source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/uclnlp/APE.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, to be published in ACL-IJCNLP 202