Andrea Favalli

Valentina Bellomaria, Giuseppe Castellucci, Andrea Favalli et al.

The widespread use of conversational and question answering systems made it necessary to improve the performances of speaker intent detection and understanding of related semantic slots, i.e., Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). Often, these tasks are approached with supervised learning methods, which needs considerable labeled datasets. This paper presents the first Italian dataset for SLU. It is derived through a semi-automatic procedure and is used as a benchmark of various open source and commercial systems.

Federico Ranaldi, Elena Sofia Ruzzetti, Dario Onorati et al.

Understanding textual description to generate code seems to be an achieved capability of instruction-following Large Language Models (LLMs) in zero-shot scenario. However, there is a severe possibility that this translation ability may be influenced by having seen target textual descriptions and the related code. This effect is known as Data Contamination. In this study, we investigate the impact of Data Contamination on the performance of GPT-3.5 in the Text-to-SQL code-generating tasks. Hence, we introduce a novel method to detect Data Contamination in GPTs and examine GPT-3.5's Text-to-SQL performances using the known Spider Dataset and our new unfamiliar dataset Termite. Furthermore, we analyze GPT-3.5's efficacy on databases with modified information via an adversarial table disconnection (ATD) approach, complicating Text-to-SQL tasks by removing structural pieces of information from the database. Our results indicate a significant performance drop in GPT-3.5 on the unfamiliar Termite dataset, even with ATD modifications, highlighting the effect of Data Contamination on LLMs in Text-to-SQL translation tasks.

Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, Elena Sofia Ruzzetti, Giancarlo A. Xompero et al.

Memorization is a fundamental ability of Transformer-based Large Language Models, achieved through learning. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift by designing an architecture to memorize text directly, bearing in mind the principle that memorization precedes learning. We introduce MeMo, a novel architecture for language modeling that explicitly memorizes sequences of tokens in layered associative memories. By design, MeMo offers transparency and the possibility of model editing, including forgetting texts. We experimented with the MeMo architecture, showing the memorization power of the one-layer and the multi-layer configurations.

Davide Venditti, Elena Sofia Ruzzetti, Giancarlo A. Xompero et al.

Large language models (LLMs) require a significant redesign in solutions to preserve privacy in data-intensive applications due to their text-generation capabilities. Indeed, LLMs tend to memorize and emit private information when maliciously prompted. In this paper, we introduce Private Association Editing (PAE) as a novel defense approach for private data leakage. PAE is designed to effectively remove Personally Identifiable Information (PII) without retraining the model. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of PAE with respect to alternative baseline methods. We believe PAE will serve as a critical tool in the ongoing effort to protect data privacy in LLMs, encouraging the development of safer models for real-world applications.

Giancarlo A. Xompero, Michele Mastromattei, Samir Salman et al.

Incorporating explicit domain knowledge into neural-based task-oriented dialogue systems is an effective way to reduce the need of large sets of annotated dialogues. In this paper, we investigate how the use of explicit domain knowledge of conversational designers affects the performance of neural-based dialogue systems. To support this investigation, we propose the Conversational-Logic-Injection-in-Neural-Network system (CLINN) where explicit knowledge is coded in semi-logical rules. By using CLINN, we evaluated semi-logical rules produced by a team of differently skilled conversational designers. We experimented with the Restaurant topic of the MultiWOZ dataset. Results show that external knowledge is extremely important for reducing the need of annotated examples for conversational systems. In fact, rules from conversational designers used in CLINN significantly outperform a state-of-the-art neural-based dialogue system.

Giuseppe Castellucci, Valentina Bellomaria, Andrea Favalli et al.

Intent Detection and Slot Filling are two pillar tasks in Spoken Natural Language Understanding. Common approaches adopt joint Deep Learning architectures in attention-based recurrent frameworks. In this work, we aim at exploiting the success of "recurrence-less" models for these tasks. We introduce Bert-Joint, i.e., a multi-lingual joint text classification and sequence labeling framework. The experimental evaluation over two well-known English benchmarks demonstrates the strong performances that can be obtained with this model, even when few annotated data is available. Moreover, we annotated a new dataset for the Italian language, and we observed similar performances without the need for changing the model.