Marija Sakota

Martin Josifoski, Marija Sakota, Maxime Peyrard et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have great potential for synthetic data generation. This work shows that useful data can be synthetically generated even for tasks that cannot be solved directly by LLMs: for problems with structured outputs, it is possible to prompt an LLM to perform the task in the reverse direction, by generating plausible input text for a target output structure. Leveraging this asymmetry in task difficulty makes it possible to produce large-scale, high-quality data for complex tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on closed information extraction, where collecting ground-truth data is challenging, and no satisfactory dataset exists to date. We synthetically generate a dataset of 1.8M data points, establish its superior quality compared to existing datasets in a human evaluation, and use it to finetune small models (220M and 770M parameters), termed SynthIE, that outperform the prior state of the art (with equal model size) by a substantial margin of 57 absolute points in micro-F1 and 79 points in macro-F1. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/epfl-dlab/SynthIE.

Marija Sakota, Maxime Peyrard, Robert West

Wikipedia is one of the richest knowledge sources on the Web today. In order to facilitate navigating, searching, and maintaining its content, Wikipedia's guidelines state that all articles should be annotated with a so-called short description indicating the article's topic (e.g., the short description of beer is "Alcoholic drink made from fermented cereal grains"). Nonetheless, a large fraction of articles (ranging from 10.2% in Dutch to 99.7% in Kazakh) have no short description yet, with detrimental effects for millions of Wikipedia users. Motivated by this problem, we introduce the novel task of automatically generating short descriptions for Wikipedia articles and propose Descartes, a multilingual model for tackling it. Descartes integrates three sources of information to generate an article description in a target language: the text of the article in all its language versions, the already-existing descriptions (if any) of the article in other languages, and semantic type information obtained from a knowledge graph. We evaluate a Descartes model trained for handling 25 languages simultaneously, showing that it beats baselines (including a strong translation-based baseline) and performs on par with monolingual models tailored for specific languages. A human evaluation on three languages further shows that the quality of Descartes's descriptions is largely indistinguishable from that of human-written descriptions; e.g., 91.3% of our English descriptions (vs. 92.1% of human-written descriptions) pass the bar for inclusion in Wikipedia, suggesting that Descartes is ready for production, with the potential to support human editors in filling a major gap in today's Wikipedia across languages.

Panayiotis Danassis, Marija Sakota, Aris Filos-Ratsikas et al.

We study the optimization of large-scale, real-time ridesharing systems and propose a modular design methodology, Component Algorithms for Ridesharing (CAR). We evaluate a diverse set of CARs (14 in total), focusing on the key algorithmic components of ridesharing. We take a multi-objective approach, evaluating 12 metrics related to global efficiency, complexity, passenger, driver, and platform incentives, in settings designed to closely resemble reality in every aspect, focusing on vehicles of capacity two. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest and most comprehensive evaluation to date. We (i) identify CARs that perform well on global, passenger, driver or platform metrics, (ii) demonstrate that lightweight relocation schemes can significantly improve the Quality of Service by up to $50\%$, and (iii) highlight a practical, scalable, on-device CAR that works well across all metrics.