Dayne Freitag

Fan Bai, Alan Ritter, Peter Madrid et al.

In this paper we present SynKB, an open-source, automatically extracted knowledge base of chemical synthesis protocols. Similar to proprietary chemistry databases such as Reaxsys, SynKB allows chemists to retrieve structured knowledge about synthetic procedures. By taking advantage of recent advances in natural language processing for procedural texts, SynKB supports more flexible queries about reaction conditions, and thus has the potential to help chemists search the literature for conditions used in relevant reactions as they design new synthetic routes. Using customized Transformer models to automatically extract information from 6 million synthesis procedures described in U.S. and EU patents, we show that for many queries, SynKB has higher recall than Reaxsys, while maintaining high precision. We plan to make SynKB available as an open-source tool; in contrast, proprietary chemistry databases require costly subscriptions.

Fan Bai, Junmo Kang, Gabriel Stanovsky et al.

In this paper, we explore the question of whether large language models can support cost-efficient information extraction from tables. We introduce schema-driven information extraction, a new task that transforms tabular data into structured records following a human-authored schema. To assess various LLM's capabilities on this task, we present a benchmark comprised of tables from four diverse domains: machine learning papers, chemistry literature, material science journals, and webpages. We use this collection of annotated tables to evaluate the ability of open-source and API-based language models to extract information from tables covering diverse domains and data formats. Our experiments demonstrate that surprisingly competitive performance can be achieved without requiring task-specific pipelines or labels, achieving F1 scores ranging from 74.2 to 96.1, while maintaining cost efficiency. Moreover, through detailed ablation studies and analyses, we investigate the factors contributing to model success and validate the practicality of distilling compact models to reduce API reliance.

Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran, Michihiro Yasunaga, Dragomir Radev et al.

The CL-SciSumm Shared Task is the first medium-scale shared task on scientific document summarization in the computational linguistics~(CL) domain. In 2019, it comprised three tasks: (1A) identifying relationships between citing documents and the referred document, (1B) classifying the discourse facets, and (2) generating the abstractive summary. The dataset comprised 40 annotated sets of citing and reference papers of the CL-SciSumm 2018 corpus and 1000 more from the SciSummNet dataset. All papers are from the open access research papers in the CL domain. This overview describes the participation and the official results of the CL-SciSumm 2019 Shared Task, organized as a part of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), held in Paris, France in July 2019. We compare the participating systems in terms of two evaluation metrics and discuss the use of ROUGE as an evaluation metric. The annotated dataset used for this shared task and the scripts used for evaluation can be accessed and used by the community at: https://github.com/WING-NUS/scisumm-corpus.

Eric Yeh, John Cadigan, Ran Chen et al.

Recent research has explored using very large language models (LLMs) as proxies for humans in tasks such as simulation, surveys, and studies. While LLMs do not possess a human psychology, they often can emulate human behaviors with sufficiently high fidelity to drive simulations to test human behavioral hypotheses, exhibiting more nuance and range than the rule-based agents often employed in behavioral economics. One key area of interest is the effect of personality on decision making, but the requirement that a prompt must be created for every tested personality profile introduces experimental overhead and degrades replicability. To address this issue, we leverage interpolative decoding, representing each dimension of personality as a pair of opposed prompts and employing an interpolation parameter to simulate behavior along the dimension. We show that interpolative decoding reliably modulates scores along each of the Big Five dimensions. We then show how interpolative decoding causes LLMs to mimic human decision-making behavior in economic games, replicating results from human psychological research. Finally, we present preliminary results of our efforts to ``twin'' individual human players in a collaborative game through systematic search for points in interpolation space that cause the system to replicate actions taken by the human subject.