Divya Tadimeti

Divya Tadimeti, Shawn Pan, Sameera Lanka et al.

Short-form text rewriting is a constrained variant of paraphrasing in which limited context and high semantic density leave little room for variation. While large language models perform well on general paraphrasing, small language models (SLMs) often struggle with semantic fidelity and hallucination robustness in short-form settings. In this work, we present an empirical study of adapting an SLM, Phi Silica, for short-form rewrite through dataset curation, prompt distillation, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and evaluation. We curate a dataset of short presentation-style text from public slide decks and use GPT-5-chat both to generate rewrite supervision and to conduct LLM-as-a-judge evaluation. Our results show that finetuning improves semantic fidelity, reduces hallucinations, and increases preference win rate against GPT-5-chat rewrites. The findings suggest that targeted adaptation for SLMs can substantially narrow the gap to cloud models and provide practical guidance for adapting SLMs to precision-critical rewrite tasks.

Li Lucy, Divya Tadimeti, David Bamman · berkeley

A common paradigm for identifying semantic differences across social and temporal contexts is the use of static word embeddings and their distances. In particular, past work has compared embeddings against "semantic axes" that represent two opposing concepts. We extend this paradigm to BERT embeddings, and construct contextualized axes that mitigate the pitfall where antonyms have neighboring representations. We validate and demonstrate these axes on two people-centric datasets: occupations from Wikipedia, and multi-platform discussions in extremist, men's communities over fourteen years. In both studies, contextualized semantic axes can characterize differences among instances of the same word type. In the latter study, we show that references to women and the contexts around them have become more detestable over time.

Jaekwon Yoo, Kunal Chandiramani, Divya Tadimeti et al.

While integrating speech encoder with LLM requires substantial data and resources, use cases face limitations due to insufficient availability. To address this, we propose a solution with a parameter-efficient adapter that converts speech embeddings into LLM-compatible tokens, focusing on end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR), named entity recognition (NER), and sentiment analysis (SA). To reduce labeling costs, we employ an LLM-based synthetic dataset annotation technique. The proposed adapter, using 7x fewer trainable parameters, achieves significant performance gains: a 26% relative Word Error Rates (WER) improvement on the LibriSpeech ASR task, a 6.3% relative F1 score increase on the NER task, and a 32% relative F1 score boost on the SA task. Moreover, using advanced techniques such as adding a classifier regularizer and optimizing the LLM with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) yields notable performance gains, with Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation (SLUE) score improvement of 6.6% and 9.5%