Daily Papers

Most available data is unstructured, making it challenging to access valuable information. Automatically building Knowledge Graphs (KGs) is crucial for structuring data and making it accessible, allowing users to search for information effectively. KGs also facilitate insights, inference, and reasoning. Traditional NLP methods, such as named entity recognition and relation extraction, are key in information retrieval but face limitations, including the use of predefined entity types and the need for supervised learning. Current research leverages large language models' capabilities, such as zero- or few-shot learning. However, unresolved and semantically duplicated entities and relations still pose challenges, leading to inconsistent graphs and requiring extensive post-processing. Additionally, most approaches are topic-dependent. In this paper, we propose iText2KG, a method for incremental, topic-independent KG construction without post-processing. This plug-and-play, zero-shot method is applicable across a wide range of KG construction scenarios and comprises four modules: Document Distiller, Incremental Entity Extractor, Incremental Relation Extractor, and Graph Integrator and Visualization. Our method demonstrates superior performance compared to baseline methods across three scenarios: converting scientific papers to graphs, websites to graphs, and CVs to graphs.

Progress in machine learning has been driven in large part by massive increases in data. However, large web-scale datasets such as LAION are largely uncurated beyond searches for exact duplicates, potentially leaving much redundancy. Here, we introduce SemDeDup, a method which leverages embeddings from pre-trained models to identify and remove semantic duplicates: data pairs which are semantically similar, but not exactly identical. Removing semantic duplicates preserves performance and speeds up learning. Analyzing a subset of LAION, we show that SemDeDup can remove 50% of the data with minimal performance loss, effectively halving training time. Moreover, performance increases out of distribution. Also, analyzing language models trained on C4, a partially curated dataset, we show that SemDeDup improves over prior approaches while providing efficiency gains. SemDeDup provides an example of how simple ways of leveraging quality embeddings can be used to make models learn faster with less data.

Entities are at the center of how we represent and aggregate knowledge. For instance, Encyclopedias such as Wikipedia are structured by entities (e.g., one per Wikipedia article). The ability to retrieve such entities given a query is fundamental for knowledge-intensive tasks such as entity linking and open-domain question answering. Current approaches can be understood as classifiers among atomic labels, one for each entity. Their weight vectors are dense entity representations produced by encoding entity meta information such as their descriptions. This approach has several shortcomings: (i) context and entity affinity is mainly captured through a vector dot product, potentially missing fine-grained interactions; (ii) a large memory footprint is needed to store dense representations when considering large entity sets; (iii) an appropriately hard set of negative data has to be subsampled at training time. In this work, we propose GENRE, the first system that retrieves entities by generating their unique names, left to right, token-by-token in an autoregressive fashion. This mitigates the aforementioned technical issues since: (i) the autoregressive formulation directly captures relations between context and entity name, effectively cross encoding both; (ii) the memory footprint is greatly reduced because the parameters of our encoder-decoder architecture scale with vocabulary size, not entity count; (iii) the softmax loss is computed without subsampling negative data. We experiment with more than 20 datasets on entity disambiguation, end-to-end entity linking and document retrieval tasks, achieving new state-of-the-art or very competitive results while using a tiny fraction of the memory footprint of competing systems. Finally, we demonstrate that new entities can be added by simply specifying their names. Code and pre-trained models at https://github.com/facebookresearch/GENRE.

Large text corpora are the backbone of language models. However, we have a limited understanding of the content of these corpora, including general statistics, quality, social factors, and inclusion of evaluation data (contamination). In this work, we propose What's In My Big Data? (WIMBD), a platform and a set of sixteen analyses that allow us to reveal and compare the contents of large text corpora. WIMBD builds on two basic capabilities -- count and search -- at scale, which allows us to analyze more than 35 terabytes on a standard compute node. We apply WIMBD to ten different corpora used to train popular language models, including C4, The Pile, and RedPajama. Our analysis uncovers several surprising and previously undocumented findings about these corpora, including the high prevalence of duplicate, synthetic, and low-quality content, personally identifiable information, toxic language, and benchmark contamination. For instance, we find that about 50% of the documents in RedPajama and LAION-2B-en are duplicates. In addition, several datasets used for benchmarking models trained on such corpora are contaminated with respect to important benchmarks, including the Winograd Schema Challenge and parts of GLUE and SuperGLUE. We open-source WIMBD's code and artifacts to provide a standard set of evaluations for new text-based corpora and to encourage more analyses and transparency around them: github.com/allenai/wimbd.

In this paper, the authors propose TriBERTa, a supervised entity resolution system that utilizes a pre-trained large language model and a triplet loss function to learn representations for entity matching. The system consists of two steps: first, name entity records are fed into a Sentence Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (SBERT) model to generate vector representations, which are then fine-tuned using contrastive learning based on a triplet loss function. Fine-tuned representations are used as input for entity matching tasks, and the results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art representations, including SBERT without fine-tuning and conventional Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), by a margin of 3 - 19%. Additionally, the representations generated by TriBERTa demonstrated increased robustness, maintaining consistently higher performance across a range of datasets. The authors also discussed the importance of entity resolution in today's data-driven landscape and the challenges that arise when identifying and reconciling duplicate data across different sources. They also described the ER process, which involves several crucial steps, including blocking, entity matching, and clustering.

Ancient manuscripts are the primary source of ancient linguistic corpora. However, many ancient manuscripts exhibit duplications due to unintentional repeated publication or deliberate forgery. The Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, include counterfeit fragments, whereas Oracle Bones (OB) contain both republished materials and fabricated specimens. Identifying ancient manuscript duplicates is of great significance for both archaeological curation and ancient history study. In this work, we design a progressive OB duplicate discovery framework that combines unsupervised low-level keypoints matching with high-level text-centric content-based matching to refine and rank the candidate OB duplicates with semantic awareness and interpretability. We compare our model with state-of-the-art content-based image retrieval and image matching methods, showing that our model yields comparable recall performance and the highest simplified mean reciprocal rank scores for both Top-5 and Top-15 retrieval results, and with significantly accelerated computation efficiency. We have discovered over 60 pairs of new OB duplicates in real-world deployment, which were missed by domain experts for decades. Code, model and real-world results are available at: https://github.com/cszhangLMU/OBD-Finder/.

Generative models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, have societal implications that extend beyond the field of computer science. These models require large image databases like LAION-2B, which contain two billion images. At this scale, manual inspection is difficult and automated analysis is challenging. In addition, recent studies show that duplicated images pose copyright problems for models trained on LAION2B, which hinders its usability. This paper proposes an algorithmic chain that runs with modest compute, that compresses CLIP features to enable efficient duplicate detection, even for vast image volumes. Our approach demonstrates that roughly 700 million images, or about 30\%, of LAION-2B's images are likely duplicated. Our method also provides the histograms of duplication on this dataset, which we use to reveal more examples of verbatim copies by Stable Diffusion and further justify the approach. The current version of the de-duplicated set will be distributed online.

Large-scale pretraining corpora contain substantial duplicate content. Although document-level deduplication is widely used, removing subdocument-level redundancy remains challenging. At corpus scale, suffix-array-based methods are commonly applied independently within shards, leaving cross-shard duplicates undetected and making the resulting retention behavior sensitive to the sharding configuration. Hash-based methods enable global exact duplicate counting, but often rely on fixed copy-retention policies that cannot accommodate heterogeneous repetition patterns. We propose a scalable subdocument deduplication framework that decouples duplicate detection from copy retention. It identifies duplicate groups through natural-boundary segmentation, normalized exact hashing, and distributed aggregation, and then applies an explicit frequency- and length-aware retention policy that allocates an adaptive copy budget to each group, retaining more copies of low-frequency or short repetitions while more aggressively deleting high-frequency or long ones. Experiments on FineWeb-Edu and a code-containing web corpus show that models trained on data processed by our method achieve the best overall performance among the evaluated settings. These results underscore the importance of explicit copy-retention control.

A diversity of tasks use language models trained on semantic similarity data. While there are a variety of datasets that capture semantic similarity, they are either constructed from modern web data or are relatively small datasets created in the past decade by human annotators. This study utilizes a novel source, newly digitized articles from off-copyright, local U.S. newspapers, to assemble a massive-scale semantic similarity dataset spanning 70 years from 1920 to 1989 and containing nearly 400M positive semantic similarity pairs. Historically, around half of articles in U.S. local newspapers came from newswires like the Associated Press. While local papers reproduced articles from the newswire, they wrote their own headlines, which form abstractive summaries of the associated articles. We associate articles and their headlines by exploiting document layouts and language understanding. We then use deep neural methods to detect which articles are from the same underlying source, in the presence of substantial noise and abridgement. The headlines of reproduced articles form positive semantic similarity pairs. The resulting publicly available HEADLINES dataset is significantly larger than most existing semantic similarity datasets and covers a much longer span of time. It will facilitate the application of contrastively trained semantic similarity models to a variety of tasks, including the study of semantic change across space and time.

String similarity models are vital for record linkage, entity resolution, and search. In this work, we present STANCE --a learned model for computing the similarity of two strings. Our approach encodes the characters of each string, aligns the encodings using Sinkhorn Iteration (alignment is posed as an instance of optimal transport) and scores the alignment with a convolutional neural network. We evaluate STANCE's ability to detect whether two strings can refer to the same entity--a task we term alias detection. We construct five new alias detection datasets (and make them publicly available). We show that STANCE or one of its variants outperforms both state-of-the-art and classic, parameter-free similarity models on four of the five datasets. We also demonstrate STANCE's ability to improve downstream tasks by applying it to an instance of cross-document coreference and show that it leads to a 2.8 point improvement in B^3 F1 over the previous state-of-the-art approach.

Entity matching (EM), the task of identifying whether two descriptions refer to the same entity, is essential in data management. Traditional methods have evolved from rule-based to AI-driven approaches, yet current techniques using large language models (LLMs) often fall short due to their reliance on static knowledge and rigid, predefined prompts. In this paper, we introduce Libem, a compound AI system designed to address these limitations by incorporating a flexible, tool-oriented approach. Libem supports entity matching through dynamic tool use, self-refinement, and optimization, allowing it to adapt and refine its process based on the dataset and performance metrics. Unlike traditional solo-AI EM systems, which often suffer from a lack of modularity that hinders iterative design improvements and system optimization, Libem offers a composable and reusable toolchain. This approach aims to contribute to ongoing discussions and developments in AI-driven data management.

By leveraging the retrieval of information from external knowledge databases, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit enhanced capabilities for accomplishing many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, due to the inherent flaws of current retrieval systems, there might exist irrelevant information within those retrieving top-ranked passages. In this work, we present a comprehensive investigation into the robustness of LLMs to different types of irrelevant information under various conditions. We initially introduce a framework to construct high-quality irrelevant information that ranges from semantically unrelated, partially related, and related to questions. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that the constructed irrelevant information not only scores highly on similarity metrics, being highly retrieved by existing systems, but also bears semantic connections to the context. Our investigation reveals that current LLMs still face challenges in discriminating highly semantically related information and can be easily distracted by these irrelevant yet misleading contents. Besides, we also find that current solutions for handling irrelevant information have limitations in improving the robustness of LLMs to such distractions. Resources are available at https://github.com/Di-viner/LLM-Robustness-to-Irrelevant-Information.

Entity linking faces significant challenges such as prolific variations and prevalent ambiguities, especially in high-value domains with myriad entities. Standard classification approaches suffer from the annotation bottleneck and cannot effectively handle unseen entities. Zero-shot entity linking has emerged as a promising direction for generalizing to new entities, but it still requires example gold entity mentions during training and canonical descriptions for all entities, both of which are rarely available outside of Wikipedia. In this paper, we explore Knowledge-RIch Self-Supervision (tt KRISS) for biomedical entity linking, by leveraging readily available domain knowledge. In training, it generates self-supervised mention examples on unlabeled text using a domain ontology and trains a contextual encoder using contrastive learning. For inference, it samples self-supervised mentions as prototypes for each entity and conducts linking by mapping the test mention to the most similar prototype. Our approach can easily incorporate entity descriptions and gold mention labels if available. We conducted extensive experiments on seven standard datasets spanning biomedical literature and clinical notes. Without using any labeled information, our method produces tt KRISSBERT, a universal entity linker for four million UMLS entities that attains new state of the art, outperforming prior self-supervised methods by as much as 20 absolute points in accuracy.

Recent GraphRAG methods integrate graph structures into text indexing and retrieval, using knowledge graph triples to connect text chunks, thereby improving retrieval coverage and precision. However, we observe that treating text chunks as the basic unit of knowledge representation rigidly groups multiple atomic facts together, limiting the flexibility and adaptability needed to support diverse retrieval scenarios. Additionally, triple-based entity linking is sensitive to relation-extraction errors, which can lead to missing or incorrect reasoning paths and ultimately hurt retrieval accuracy. To address these issues, we propose the Atom-Entity Graph, a more precise and reliable architecture for knowledge representation and indexing. In our approach, knowledge is stored as knowledge atoms, namely individual, self-contained units of factual information, rather than coarse-grained text chunks. This allows knowledge elements to be flexibly reassembled without mutual interference, thereby enabling seamless alignment with diverse query perspectives. Edges between entities simply indicate whether a relationship exists. By combining personalized PageRank with relevance-based filtering, we maintain accurate entity connections and improve the reliability of reasoning. Theoretical analysis and experiments on five public benchmarks show that the proposed AtomicRAG algorithm outperforms strong RAG baselines in retrieval accuracy and reasoning robustness. Code: https://github.com/7HHHHH/AtomicRAG.

A variety of knowledge graph embedding approaches have been developed. Most of them obtain embeddings by learning the structure of the knowledge graph within a link prediction setting. As a result, the embeddings reflect only the semantics of a single knowledge graph, and embeddings for different knowledge graphs are not aligned, e.g., they cannot be used to find similar entities across knowledge graphs via nearest neighbor search. However, knowledge graph embedding applications such as entity disambiguation require a more global representation, i.e., a representation that is valid across multiple sources. We propose to learn universal knowledge graph embeddings from large-scale interlinked knowledge sources. To this end, we fuse large knowledge graphs based on the owl:sameAs relation such that every entity is represented by a unique identity. We instantiate our idea by computing universal embeddings based on DBpedia and Wikidata yielding embeddings for about 180 million entities, 15 thousand relations, and 1.2 billion triples. Moreover, we develop a convenient API to provide embeddings as a service. Experiments on link prediction show that universal knowledge graph embeddings encode better semantics compared to embeddings computed on a single knowledge graph. For reproducibility purposes, we provide our source code and datasets open access at https://github.com/dice-group/Universal_Embeddings

Our collective attention span is shortened by the flood of online information. With FarFetched, we address the need for automated claim validation based on the aggregated evidence derived from multiple online news sources. We introduce an entity-centric reasoning framework in which latent connections between events, actions, or statements are revealed via entity mentions and represented in a graph database. Using entity linking and semantic similarity, we offer a way for collecting and combining information from diverse sources in order to generate evidence relevant to the user's claim. Then, we leverage textual entailment recognition to quantitatively determine whether this assertion is credible, based on the created evidence. Our approach tries to fill the gap in automated claim validation for less-resourced languages and is showcased on the Greek language, complemented by the training of relevant semantic textual similarity (STS) and natural language inference (NLI) models that are evaluated on translated versions of common benchmarks.

We propose a simple Named Entity Linking system that can be trained from Wikidata only. This demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of this data source for this task and provides an easily reproducible baseline to compare other systems against. Our model is lightweight to train, to run and to keep synchronous with Wikidata in real time.

Entity matching (EM) is a critical step in entity resolution (ER). Recently, entity matching based on large language models (LLMs) has shown great promise. However, current LLM-based entity matching approaches typically follow a binary matching paradigm that ignores the global consistency between record relationships. In this paper, we investigate various methodologies for LLM-based entity matching that incorporate record interactions from different perspectives. Specifically, we comprehensively compare three representative strategies: matching, comparing, and selecting, and analyze their respective advantages and challenges in diverse scenarios. Based on our findings, we further design a compound entity matching framework (ComEM) that leverages the composition of multiple strategies and LLMs. ComEM benefits from the advantages of different sides and achieves improvements in both effectiveness and efficiency. Experimental results on 8 ER datasets and 9 LLMs verify the superiority of incorporating record interactions through the selecting strategy, as well as the further cost-effectiveness brought by ComEM.

Idioms pose a fundamental challenge for language models, as their meaning cannot be inferred from surface form alone. Understanding such expressions, therefore, requires semantic abstraction beyond lexical overlap. We introduce IdioLink, a retrieval benchmark designed to test whether models can link idiomatic expressions to conceptually equivalent meanings expressed in literal or paraphrased forms. IdioLink comprises 10,700 documents and 2,140 queries, spanning 107 idioms with both literal and figurative uses. Each document and query is annotated with spans that convey the core meaning. Evaluating strong embedding baselines (e.g., BGE, E5, Contriever, and Qwen), we show that current models struggle to retrieve equivalent meanings across divergent surface realizations, relying instead on topical and shallow semantic cues. IdioLink exposes key gaps in idiom-aware semantic retrieval and provides a challenging testbed for future models.

We present NER Retriever, a zero-shot retrieval framework for ad-hoc Named Entity Retrieval, a variant of Named Entity Recognition (NER), where the types of interest are not provided in advance, and a user-defined type description is used to retrieve documents mentioning entities of that type. Instead of relying on fixed schemas or fine-tuned models, our method builds on internal representations of large language models (LLMs) to embed both entity mentions and user-provided open-ended type descriptions into a shared semantic space. We show that internal representations, specifically the value vectors from mid-layer transformer blocks, encode fine-grained type information more effectively than commonly used top-layer embeddings. To refine these representations, we train a lightweight contrastive projection network that aligns type-compatible entities while separating unrelated types. The resulting entity embeddings are compact, type-aware, and well-suited for nearest-neighbor search. Evaluated on three benchmarks, NER Retriever significantly outperforms both lexical and dense sentence-level retrieval baselines. Our findings provide empirical support for representation selection within LLMs and demonstrate a practical solution for scalable, schema-free entity retrieval. The NER Retriever Codebase is publicly available at https://github.com/ShacharOr100/ner_retriever

Entity alignment is to find identical entities in different knowledge graphs (KGs) that refer to the same real-world object. Embedding-based entity alignment techniques have been drawing a lot of attention recently because they can help solve the issue of symbolic heterogeneity in different KGs. However, in this paper, we show that the progress made in the past was due to biased and unchallenging evaluation. We highlight two major flaws in existing datasets that favor embedding-based entity alignment techniques, i.e., the isomorphic graph structures in relation triples and the weak heterogeneity in attribute triples. Towards a critical evaluation of embedding-based entity alignment methods, we construct a new dataset with heterogeneous relations and attributes based on event-centric KGs. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate existing popular methods, and find that they fail to achieve promising performance. As a new approach to this difficult problem, we propose a time-aware literal encoder for entity alignment. The dataset and source code are publicly available to foster future research. Our work calls for more effective and practical embedding-based solutions to entity alignment.

Released Large Language Models (LLMs) are often paired with a claimed knowledge cutoff date, or the dates at which training data was gathered. Such information is crucial for applications where the LLM must provide up to date information. However, this statement only scratches the surface: do all resources in the training data share the same knowledge cutoff date? Does the model's demonstrated knowledge for these subsets closely align to their cutoff dates? In this work, we define the notion of an effective cutoff. This is distinct from the LLM designer reported cutoff and applies separately to sub-resources and topics. We propose a simple approach to estimate effective cutoffs on the resource-level temporal alignment of an LLM by probing across versions of the data. Using this analysis, we find that effective cutoffs often differ from reported cutoffs. To understand the root cause of this observation, we conduct a direct large-scale analysis on open pre-training datasets. Our analysis reveals two reasons for these inconsistencies: (1) temporal biases of CommonCrawl data due to non-trivial amounts of old data in new dumps and (2) complications in LLM deduplication schemes involving semantic duplicates and lexical near-duplicates. Overall, our results show that knowledge cutoffs are not as simple as they have seemed and that care must be taken both by LLM dataset curators as well as practitioners who seek to use information from these models.

Classic lexical-matching-based QA metrics are slowly being phased out because they punish succinct or informative outputs just because those answers were not provided as ground truth. Recently proposed neural metrics can evaluate semantic similarity but were trained on small textual similarity datasets grafted from foreign domains. We introduce the Wiki Entity Similarity (WES) dataset, an 11M example, domain targeted, semantic entity similarity dataset that is generated from link texts in Wikipedia. WES is tailored to QA evaluation: the examples are entities and phrases and grouped into semantic clusters to simulate multiple ground-truth labels. Human annotators consistently agree with WES labels, and a basic cross encoder metric is better than four classic metrics at predicting human judgments of correctness.

With the rapid development of NLP, large-scale language models (LLMs) excel in various tasks across multiple domains now. However, existing benchmarks may not adequately measure these models' capabilities, especially when faced with new knowledge. In this paper, we address the lack of benchmarks to evaluate LLMs' ability to handle new knowledge, an important and challenging aspect in the rapidly evolving world. We propose an approach called KnowGen that generates new knowledge by altering existing entity attributes and relationships, resulting in artificial entities that are distinct from real-world entities. With KnowGen, we introduce a benchmark named ALCUNA to assess LLMs' abilities in knowledge understanding, differentiation, and association. We benchmark several LLMs, reveals that their performance in face of new knowledge is not satisfactory, particularly in reasoning between new and internal knowledge. We also explore the impact of entity similarity on the model's understanding of entity knowledge and the influence of contextual entities. We appeal to the need for caution when using LLMs in new scenarios or with new knowledge, and hope that our benchmarks can help drive the development of LLMs in face of new knowledge.

Entity resolution is a widely studied problem with several proposals to match records across relations. Matching textual content is a widespread task in many applications, such as question answering and search. While recent methods achieve promising results for these two tasks, there is no clear solution for the more general problem of matching textual content and structured data. We introduce a framework that supports this new task in an unsupervised setting for any pair of corpora, being relational tables or text documents. Our method builds a fine-grained graph over the content of the corpora and derives word embeddings to represent the objects to match in a low dimensional space. The learned representation enables effective and efficient matching at different granularity, from relational tuples to text sentences and paragraphs. Our flexible framework can exploit pre-trained resources, but it does not depends on their existence and achieves better quality performance in matching content when the vocabulary is domain specific. We also introduce optimizations in the graph creation process with an "expand and compress" approach that first identifies new valid relationships across elements, to improve matching, and then prunes nodes and edges, to reduce the graph size. Experiments on real use cases and public datasets show that our framework produces embeddings that outperform word embeddings and fine-tuned language models both in results' quality and in execution times.

We find that existing language modeling datasets contain many near-duplicate examples and long repetitive substrings. As a result, over 1% of the unprompted output of language models trained on these datasets is copied verbatim from the training data. We develop two tools that allow us to deduplicate training datasets -- for example removing from C4 a single 61 word English sentence that is repeated over 60,000 times. Deduplication allows us to train models that emit memorized text ten times less frequently and require fewer train steps to achieve the same or better accuracy. We can also reduce train-test overlap, which affects over 4% of the validation set of standard datasets, thus allowing for more accurate evaluation. We release code for reproducing our work and performing dataset deduplication at https://github.com/google-research/deduplicate-text-datasets.

Scholars studying organizations often work with multiple datasets lacking shared unique identifiers or covariates. In such situations, researchers may turn to approximate string matching methods to combine datasets. String matching, although useful, faces fundamental challenges. Even when two strings appear similar to humans, fuzzy matching often does not work because it fails to adapt to the informativeness of the character combinations presented. Worse, many entities have multiple names that are dissimilar (e.g., "Fannie Mae" and "Federal National Mortgage Association"), a case where string matching has little hope of succeeding. This paper introduces data from a prominent employment-related networking site (LinkedIn) as a tool to address these problems. We propose interconnected approaches to leveraging the massive amount of information from LinkedIn regarding organizational name-to-name links. The first approach builds a machine learning model for predicting matches from character strings, treating the trillions of user-contributed organizational name pairs as a training corpus: this approach constructs a string matching metric that explicitly maximizes match probabilities. A second approach identifies relationships between organization names using network representations of the LinkedIn data. A third approach combines the first and second. We document substantial improvements over fuzzy matching in applications, making all methods accessible in open-source software ("LinkOrgs").

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based large language models (LLMs) are widely used in finance for their excellent performance on knowledge-intensive tasks. However, standardized documents (e.g., SEC filing) share similar formats such as repetitive boilerplate texts, and similar table structures. This similarity forces traditional RAG methods to misidentify near-duplicate text, leading to duplicate retrieval that undermines accuracy and completeness. To address these issues, we propose the Hierarchical Retrieval with Evidence Curation (HiREC) framework. Our approach first performs hierarchical retrieval to reduce confusion among similar texts. It first retrieve related documents and then selects the most relevant passages from the documents. The evidence curation process removes irrelevant passages. When necessary, it automatically generates complementary queries to collect missing information. To evaluate our approach, we construct and release a Large-scale Open-domain Financial (LOFin) question answering benchmark that includes 145,897 SEC documents and 1,595 question-answer pairs. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/deep-over/LOFin-bench-HiREC.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems depend on retrieving semantically relevant document chunks to support accurate, grounded outputs from large language models. In structured and repetitive corpora such as regulatory filings, chunk similarity alone often fails to distinguish between documents with overlapping language. Practitioners often flatten metadata into input text as a heuristic, but the impact and trade-offs of this practice remain poorly understood. We present a systematic study of metadata-aware retrieval strategies, comparing plain-text baselines with approaches that embed metadata directly. Our evaluation spans metadata-as-text (prefix and suffix), a dual-encoder unified embedding that fuses metadata and content in a single index, dual-encoder late-fusion retrieval, and metadata-aware query reformulation. Across multiple retrieval metrics and question types, we find that prefixing and unified embeddings consistently outperform plain-text baselines, with the unified at times exceeding prefixing while being easier to maintain. Beyond empirical comparisons, we analyze embedding space, showing that metadata integration improves effectiveness by increasing intra-document cohesion, reducing inter-document confusion, and widening the separation between relevant and irrelevant chunks. Field-level ablations show that structural cues provide strong disambiguating signals. Our code, evaluation framework, and the RAGMATE-10K dataset are publicly hosted.

Different entities with the same name can be difficult to distinguish. Handling confusing entity mentions is a crucial skill for language models (LMs). For example, given the question "Where was Michael Jordan educated?" and a set of documents discussing different people named Michael Jordan, can LMs distinguish entity mentions to generate a cohesive answer to the question? To test this ability, we introduce a new benchmark, AmbigDocs. By leveraging Wikipedia's disambiguation pages, we identify a set of documents, belonging to different entities who share an ambiguous name. From these documents, we generate questions containing an ambiguous name and their corresponding sets of answers. Our analysis reveals that current state-of-the-art models often yield ambiguous answers or incorrectly merge information belonging to different entities. We establish an ontology categorizing four types of incomplete answers and automatic evaluation metrics to identify such categories. We lay the foundation for future work on reasoning across multiple documents with ambiguous entities.

Why do we need another AI to help the AI? We argue you don't. Stateless LLM sessions impose re-orientation costs on iterative, session-heavy workflows. Prior work addresses cross-session memory through retrieval-augmented approaches: store history, embed it, retrieve by semantic similarity. Cross-session memory is a state management problem, not a search problem. Similarity search fails for named entity resolution within bounded vocabulary contexts because beliefs about a shared technical domain are semantically proximate by construction. A single user is the simplest bounded vocabulary context; engineering teams converge on the same property through shared codebases and terminology. We present Tenure, a local-first proxy that maintains a typed belief store with epistemic status, versioned supersession, and scope isolation, injecting curated context into every LLM session through precision-first retrieval. Hard scope isolation provides a structural guarantee: the right beliefs surface, and only within the boundaries the user has authorized. Tenure's typed schema converts extracted facts into imperative instructions via a why it matters field, making injected beliefs directly actionable rather than raw material for the model to re-derive. A controlled evaluation on 72 retrieval cases demonstrates the gap. Cosine similarity over dense embeddings achieves mean precision of 0.12. Alias-weighted BM25 maintains mean precision of 1.0, passing 72/72 cases versus 8/72 for cosine similarity on the same corpus. Hybrid retrieval typically solves vocabulary mismatch between disparate authors; Tenure eliminates this structurally: query and belief authors are the same person, and an alias enrichment flywheel continuously indexes their specific vocabulary. Under multi-turn topic drift this worsens: the vector backend produces drift scores of 0.43--0.50 on noise-critical turns where BM25 maintains 0.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated improved generation performance by incorporating externally retrieved knowledge, a process known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Despite the potential of this approach, existing studies evaluate RAG effectiveness by 1) assessing retrieval and generation components jointly, which obscures retrieval's distinct contribution, or 2) examining retrievers using traditional metrics such as NDCG, which creates a gap in understanding retrieval's true utility in the overall generation process. To address the above limitations, in this work, we introduce an automatic evaluation method that measures retrieval quality through the lens of information gain within the RAG framework. Specifically, we propose Semantic Perplexity (SePer), a metric that captures the LLM's internal belief about the correctness of the retrieved information. We quantify the utility of retrieval by the extent to which it reduces semantic perplexity post-retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SePer not only aligns closely with human preferences but also offers a more precise and efficient evaluation of retrieval utility across diverse RAG scenarios.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances LLM reasoning in knowledge-intensive tasks, but existing RAG pipelines incur substantial retrieval and generation overhead when applied to large-scale entity matching. To address this limitation, we introduce CE-RAG4EM, a cost-efficient RAG architecture that reduces computation through blocking-based batch retrieval and generation. We also present a unified framework for analyzing and evaluating RAG systems for entity matching, focusing on blocking-aware optimizations and retrieval granularity. Extensive experiments suggest that CE-RAG4EM can achieve comparable or improved matching quality while substantially reducing end-to-end runtime relative to strong baselines. Our analysis further reveals that key configuration parameters introduce an inherent trade-off between performance and overhead, offering practical guidance for designing efficient and scalable RAG systems for entity matching and data integration.

Schema matching is a crucial task in data integration, involving the alignment of a source schema with a target schema to establish correspondence between their elements. This task is challenging due to textual and semantic heterogeneity, as well as differences in schema sizes. Although machine-learning-based solutions have been explored in numerous studies, they often suffer from low accuracy, require manual mapping of the schemas for model training, or need access to source schema data which might be unavailable due to privacy concerns. In this paper we present a novel method, named ReMatch, for matching schemas using retrieval-enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Our method avoids the need for predefined mapping, any model training, or access to data in the source database. Our experimental results on large real-world schemas demonstrate that ReMatch is an effective matcher. By eliminating the requirement for training data, ReMatch becomes a viable solution for real-world scenarios.

Large language models are commonly trained on a mixture of filtered web data and curated high-quality corpora, such as social media conversations, books, or technical papers. This curation process is believed to be necessary to produce performant models with broad zero-shot generalization abilities. However, as larger models requiring pretraining on trillions of tokens are considered, it is unclear how scalable is curation and whether we will run out of unique high-quality data soon. At variance with previous beliefs, we show that properly filtered and deduplicated web data alone can lead to powerful models; even significantly outperforming models from the state-of-the-art trained on The Pile. Despite extensive filtering, the high-quality data we extract from the web is still plentiful, and we are able to obtain five trillion tokens from CommonCrawl. We publicly release an extract of 600 billion tokens from our RefinedWeb dataset, and 1.3/7.5B parameters language models trained on it.

We introduce ReFinED, an efficient end-to-end entity linking model which uses fine-grained entity types and entity descriptions to perform linking. The model performs mention detection, fine-grained entity typing, and entity disambiguation for all mentions within a document in a single forward pass, making it more than 60 times faster than competitive existing approaches. ReFinED also surpasses state-of-the-art performance on standard entity linking datasets by an average of 3.7 F1. The model is capable of generalising to large-scale knowledge bases such as Wikidata (which has 15 times more entities than Wikipedia) and of zero-shot entity linking. The combination of speed, accuracy and scale makes ReFinED an effective and cost-efficient system for extracting entities from web-scale datasets, for which the model has been successfully deployed. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/alexa/ReFinED

Code cloning, the duplication of code fragments, is common in software development. While some reuse aids productivity, excessive cloning hurts maintainability and introduces bugs. Hence, automatic code clone detection is vital. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) possess diverse code-related knowledge, making them versatile for various software engineering challenges. However, LLMs' performance in code clone detection is unclear and needs more study for accurate assessment. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive evaluation of LLMs for clone detection, covering different clone types, languages, and prompts. We find advanced LLMs excel in detecting complex semantic clones, surpassing existing methods. Adding intermediate reasoning steps via chain-of-thought prompts noticeably enhances performance. Additionally, representing code as vector embeddings, especially with text encoders, effectively aids clone detection.Lastly, the ability of LLMs to detect code clones differs among various programming languages. Our study suggests that LLMs have potential for clone detection due to their language capabilities, offering insights for developing robust LLM-based methods to enhance software engineering.

Local models have recently attained astounding performances in Entity Disambiguation (ED), with generative and extractive formulations being the most promising research directions. However, previous works limited their studies to using, as the textual representation of each candidate, only its Wikipedia title. Although certainly effective, this strategy presents a few critical issues, especially when titles are not sufficiently informative or distinguishable from one another. In this paper, we address this limitation and investigate to what extent more expressive textual representations can mitigate it. We thoroughly evaluate our approach against standard benchmarks in ED and find extractive formulations to be particularly well-suited to these representations: we report a new state of the art on 2 out of 6 benchmarks we consider and strongly improve the generalization capability over unseen patterns. We release our code, data and model checkpoints at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/extend.

Statutory references are central to legal language understanding, but are difficult to process automatically, as they appear in compact and variable surface forms, may combine multiple targets, use special abbreviations, and often point to lower-level units. Existing tools for German focus either on parsing references from legal documents or accessing statutory text once citations are explicit. This paper introduces bundesrecht, an open resource for German statutory reference processing, consisting of a software library and a structured corpus of German federal law. The library parses, normalizes, and resolves German statutory references, mapping raw citation strings to structured objects, expanding compact references into canonical forms, and linking them to statutory provisions. The accompanying dataset preserves the internal hierarchy of statutes from laws to fine-granular subclauses. We evaluate the parser and normalizer on 2,944 annotated German legal references using strict exact-match and micro information extraction metrics. We further evaluate canonical reference deduplication and show that normalized references group real citation surface variants far more reliably than string matching. bundesrecht is the first open resource that covers German statutory reference processing as an end-to-end pipeline, from raw citation string to resolved statutory provision, and is available on PyPI.

Entities, as important carriers of real-world knowledge, play a key role in many NLP tasks. We focus on incorporating entity knowledge into an encoder-decoder framework for informative text generation. Existing approaches tried to index, retrieve, and read external documents as evidence, but they suffered from a large computational overhead. In this work, we propose an encoder-decoder framework with an entity memory, namely EDMem. The entity knowledge is stored in the memory as latent representations, and the memory is pre-trained on Wikipedia along with encoder-decoder parameters. To precisely generate entity names, we design three decoding methods to constrain entity generation by linking entities in the memory. EDMem is a unified framework that can be used on various entity-intensive question answering and generation tasks. Extensive experimental results show that EDMem outperforms both memory-based auto-encoder models and non-memory encoder-decoder models.

We introduce and make publicly available an entity linking dataset from Reddit that contains 17,316 linked entities, each annotated by three human annotators and then grouped into Gold, Silver, and Bronze to indicate inter-annotator agreement. We analyze the different errors and disagreements made by annotators and suggest three types of corrections to the raw data. Finally, we tested existing entity linking models that are trained and tuned on text from non-social media datasets. We find that, although these existing entity linking models perform very well on their original datasets, they perform poorly on this social media dataset. We also show that the majority of these errors can be attributed to poor performance on the mention detection subtask. These results indicate the need for better entity linking models that can be applied to the enormous amount of social media text.

Entity resolution, the task of identifying and consolidating records that pertain to the same real-world entity, plays a pivotal role in various sectors such as e-commerce, healthcare, and law enforcement. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 has introduced a new dimension to this task, leveraging their advanced linguistic capabilities. This paper explores the potential of LLMs in the entity resolution process, shedding light on both their advantages and the computational complexities associated with large-scale matching. We introduce strategies for the efficient utilization of LLMs, including the selection of an optimal set of matching questions, namely MQsSP, which is proved to be a NP-hard problem. Our approach optimally chooses the most effective matching questions while keep consumption limited to your budget . Additionally, we propose a method to adjust the distribution of possible partitions after receiving responses from LLMs, with the goal of reducing the uncertainty of entity resolution. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach using entropy as a metric, and our experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed methods, offering promising prospects for real-world applications.

BigCloneBench is a well-known and widely used large-scale dataset for the evaluation of recall of clone detection tools. It has been beneficial for research on clone detection and has become a standard in evaluating the performance of clone detection tools. More recently, it has also been widely used as a dataset to evaluate machine learning approaches to semantic clone detection or code similarity detection for functional or semantic similarity. This paper demonstrates that BigCloneBench is problematic to use as ground truth for learning or evaluating semantic code similarity, and highlights the aspects of BigCloneBench that affect the ground truth quality. A manual investigation of a statistically significant random sample of 406 Weak Type-3/Type-4 clone pairs revealed that 93% of them do not have a similar functionality and are therefore mislabelled. In a literature review of 179 papers that use BigCloneBench as a dataset, we found 139 papers that used BigCloneBench to evaluate semantic clone detection and where the results are threatened in their validity by the mislabelling. As such, these papers often report high F1 scores (e.g., above 0.9), which indicates overfitting to dataset-specific artefacts rather than genuine semantic similarity detection. We emphasise that using BigCloneBench remains valid for the intended purpose of evaluating syntactic or textual clone detection of Type-1, Type-2, and Type-3 clones. We acknowledge the important contributions of BigCloneBench to two decades of traditional clone detection research. However, the usage of BigCloneBench beyond the intended purpose without careful consideration of its limitations has led to misleading results and conclusions, and potentially harmed the field of semantic clone detection.

This work proposes a new pipeline for leveraging data collected on the Stack Overflow website for pre-training a multimodal model for searching duplicates on question answering websites. Our multimodal model is trained on question descriptions and source codes in multiple programming languages. We design two new learning objectives to improve duplicate detection capabilities. The result of this work is a mature, fine-tuned Multimodal Question Duplicity Detection (MQDD) model, ready to be integrated into a Stack Overflow search system, where it can help users find answers for already answered questions. Alongside the MQDD model, we release two datasets related to the software engineering domain. The first Stack Overflow Dataset (SOD) represents a massive corpus of paired questions and answers. The second Stack Overflow Duplicity Dataset (SODD) contains data for training duplicate detection models.

Joint representation learning over multi-sourced knowledge graphs (KGs) yields transferable and expressive embeddings that improve downstream tasks. Entity alignment (EA) is a critical step in this process. Despite recent considerable research progress in embedding-based EA, how it works remains to be explored. In this paper, we provide a similarity flooding perspective to explain existing translation-based and aggregation-based EA models. We prove that the embedding learning process of these models actually seeks a fixpoint of pairwise similarities between entities. We also provide experimental evidence to support our theoretical analysis. We propose two simple but effective methods inspired by the fixpoint computation in similarity flooding, and demonstrate their effectiveness on benchmark datasets. Our work bridges the gap between recent embedding-based models and the conventional similarity flooding algorithm. It would improve our understanding of and increase our faith in embedding-based EA.

Code clones are pairs of code snippets that implement similar functionality. Clone detection is a fundamental branch of automatic source code comprehension, having many applications in refactoring recommendation, plagiarism detection, and code summarization. A particularly interesting case of clone detection is the detection of semantic clones, i.e., code snippets that have the same functionality but significantly differ in implementation. A promising approach to detecting semantic clones is contrastive learning (CL), a machine learning paradigm popular in computer vision but not yet commonly adopted for code processing. Our work aims to evaluate the most popular CL algorithms combined with three source code representations on two tasks. The first task is code clone detection, which we evaluate on the POJ-104 dataset containing implementations of 104 algorithms. The second task is plagiarism detection. To evaluate the models on this task, we introduce CodeTransformator, a tool for transforming source code. We use it to create a dataset that mimics plagiarised code based on competitive programming solutions. We trained nine models for both tasks and compared them with six existing approaches, including traditional tools and modern pre-trained neural models. The results of our evaluation show that proposed models perform diversely in each task, however the performance of the graph-based models is generally above the others. Among CL algorithms, SimCLR and SwAV lead to better results, while Moco is the most robust approach. Our code and trained models are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6360627, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5596345.

While large language models (LMs) demonstrate remarkable performance, they encounter challenges in providing accurate responses when queried for information beyond their pre-trained memorization. Although augmenting them with relevant external information can mitigate these issues, failure to consider the necessity of retrieval may adversely affect overall performance. Previous research has primarily focused on examining how entities influence retrieval models and knowledge recall in LMs, leaving other aspects relatively unexplored. In this work, our goal is to offer a more detailed, fact-centric analysis by exploring the effects of combinations of entities and relations. To facilitate this, we construct a new question answering (QA) dataset called WiTQA (Wikipedia Triple Question Answers). This dataset includes questions about entities and relations of various popularity levels, each accompanied by a supporting passage. Our extensive experiments with diverse LMs and retrievers reveal when retrieval does not consistently enhance LMs from the viewpoints of fact-centric popularity.Confirming earlier findings, we observe that larger LMs excel in recalling popular facts. However, they notably encounter difficulty with infrequent entity-relation pairs compared to retrievers. Interestingly, they can effectively retain popular relations of less common entities. We demonstrate the efficacy of our finer-grained metric and insights through an adaptive retrieval system that selectively employs retrieval and recall based on the frequencies of entities and relations in the question.

We present an ultra-fast and flexible search algorithm that enables search over trillion-scale natural language corpora in under 0.3 seconds while handling semantic variations (substitution, insertion, and deletion). Our approach employs string matching based on suffix arrays that scales well with corpus size. To mitigate the combinatorial explosion induced by the semantic relaxation of queries, our method is built on two key algorithmic ideas: fast exact lookup enabled by a disk-aware design, and dynamic corpus-aware pruning. We theoretically show that the proposed method suppresses exponential growth in the search space with respect to query length by leveraging statistical properties of natural language. In experiments on FineWeb-Edu (Lozhkov et al., 2024) (1.4T tokens), we show that our method achieves significantly lower search latency than existing methods: infini-gram (Liu et al., 2024), infini-gram mini (Xu et al., 2025), and SoftMatcha (Deguchi et al., 2025). As a practical application, we demonstrate that our method identifies benchmark contamination in training corpora, unidentified by existing approaches. We also provide an online demo of fast, soft search across corpora in seven languages.

Recognizing entities in texts is a central need in many information-seeking scenarios, and indeed, Named Entity Recognition (NER) is arguably one of the most successful examples of a widely adopted NLP task and corresponding NLP technology. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) appear to provide effective solutions (also) for NER tasks that were traditionally handled with dedicated models, often matching or surpassing the abilities of the dedicated models. Should NER be considered a solved problem? We argue to the contrary: the capabilities provided by LLMs are not the end of NER research, but rather an exciting beginning. They allow taking NER to the next level, tackling increasingly more useful, and increasingly more challenging, variants. We present three variants of the NER task, together with a dataset to support them. The first is a move towards more fine-grained -- and intersectional -- entity types. The second is a move towards zero-shot recognition and extraction of these fine-grained types based on entity-type labels. The third, and most challenging, is the move from the recognition setup to a novel retrieval setup, where the query is a zero-shot entity type, and the expected result is all the sentences from a large, pre-indexed corpus that contain entities of these types, and their corresponding spans. We show that all of these are far from being solved. We provide a large, silver-annotated corpus of 4 million paragraphs covering 500 entity types, to facilitate research towards all of these three goals.

After decades of massive digitisation, an unprecedented amount of historical documents is available in digital format, along with their machine-readable texts. While this represents a major step forward with respect to preservation and accessibility, it also opens up new opportunities in terms of content mining and the next fundamental challenge is to develop appropriate technologies to efficiently search, retrieve and explore information from this 'big data of the past'. Among semantic indexing opportunities, the recognition and classification of named entities are in great demand among humanities scholars. Yet, named entity recognition (NER) systems are heavily challenged with diverse, historical and noisy inputs. In this survey, we present the array of challenges posed by historical documents to NER, inventory existing resources, describe the main approaches deployed so far, and identify key priorities for future developments.

Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) models use vocabularies from pre-trained transformers, which often split entities into nonsensical fragments. Splitting entities can reduce retrieval accuracy and limits the model's ability to incorporate up-to-date world knowledge not included in the training data. In this work, we enhance the LSR vocabulary with Wikipedia concepts and entities, enabling the model to resolve ambiguities more effectively and stay current with evolving knowledge. Central to our approach is a Dynamic Vocabulary (DyVo) head, which leverages existing entity embeddings and an entity retrieval component that identifies entities relevant to a query or document. We use the DyVo head to generate entity weights, which are then merged with word piece weights to create joint representations for efficient indexing and retrieval using an inverted index. In experiments across three entity-rich document ranking datasets, the resulting DyVo model substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Although the great success of open-domain dialogue generation, unseen entities can have a large impact on the dialogue generation task. It leads to performance degradation of the model in the dialog generation. Previous researches used retrieved knowledge of seen entities as the auxiliary data to enhance the representation of the model. Nevertheless, logical explanation of unseen entities remains unexplored, such as possible co-occurrence or semantically similar words of them and their entity category. In this work, we propose an approach to address the challenge above. We construct a graph by extracting entity nodes in them, enhancing the representation of the context of the unseen entity with the entity's 1-hop surrounding nodes. Furthermore, We added the named entity tag prediction task to apply the problem that the unseen entity does not exist in the graph. We conduct our experiments on an open dataset Wizard of Wikipedia and the empirical results indicate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on Wizard of Wikipedia.

Recognizing software entities such as library names from free-form text is essential to enable many software engineering (SE) technologies, such as traceability link recovery, automated documentation, and API recommendation. While many approaches have been proposed to address this problem, they suffer from small entity vocabularies or noisy training data, hindering their ability to recognize software entities mentioned in sophisticated narratives. To address this challenge, we leverage the Wikipedia taxonomy to develop a comprehensive entity lexicon with 79K unique software entities in 12 fine-grained types, as well as a large labeled dataset of over 1.7M sentences. Then, we propose self-regularization, a noise-robust learning approach, to the training of our software entity recognition (SER) model by accounting for many dropouts. Results show that models trained with self-regularization outperform both their vanilla counterparts and state-of-the-art approaches on our Wikipedia benchmark and two Stack Overflow benchmarks. We release our models, data, and code for future research.

Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) is effective for knowledge-intensive and multi-hop query tasks; however, many existing methods primarily seed entity-based graphs and rely on implicit semantic relevance propagation. This often (i) under-retrieves when user queries are abstract and semantically sparse at the entity level, and (ii) suffers from brittle multi-hop reasoning, where noisy activations can derail entity-to-entity transitions and corrupt the inferred relation chain, yielding unreliable conclusions. To this end, we propose FlowRAG, a semantic-aware retrieval framework that improves both semantic recall and explicit reasoning. Specifically, FlowRAG constructs a quad-level heterogeneous graph over passages, summaries, sentences, and entities, where summary nodes serve as a coarse semantic hub. At retrieval time, a dual-granularity activation module combines summary--query alignment with sentence-level matching to activate relevant entities under paraphrase and abstraction robustly. We then introduce a frequency-aware weighted flow module that routes relevance through entity--passage links weighted by within-passage term frequency, pruning noisy connections and extracting high-confidence reasoning paths as an explicit logic skeleton for generation. Extensive experiments show that FlowRAG obtains state-of-the-art performance on complex reasoning benchmarks.

We introduce ParaNames, a multilingual parallel name resource consisting of 118 million names spanning across 400 languages. Names are provided for 13.6 million entities which are mapped to standardized entity types (PER/LOC/ORG). Using Wikidata as a source, we create the largest resource of this type to-date. We describe our approach to filtering and standardizing the data to provide the best quality possible. ParaNames is useful for multilingual language processing, both in defining tasks for name translation/transliteration and as supplementary data for tasks such as named entity recognition and linking. We demonstrate an application of ParaNames by training a multilingual model for canonical name translation to and from English. Our resource is released under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0) at https://github.com/bltlab/paranames.

Many modern AI question-answering systems convert text into vectors and retrieve the closest matches to a user question. While effective for topical similarity, similarity scores alone do not explain why some retrieved text can serve as evidence while other equally similar text cannot. When many candidates receive similar scores, systems may select sentences that are redundant, incomplete, or address different conditions than the question requires. This paper presents a deterministic evidence selection framework for retrieval-augmented question answering. The approach introduces Meaning-Utility Estimation (MUE) and Diversity-Utility Estimation (DUE), fixed scoring and redundancy-control procedures that determine evidence admissibility prior to answer generation. Each sentence or record is evaluated independently using explicit signals for semantic relatedness, term coverage, conceptual distinctiveness, and redundancy. No training or fine-tuning is required. In the prototype, a unit is accepted only if it explicitly states the fact, rule, or condition required by the task. Units are not merged or expanded. If no unit independently satisfies the requirement, the system returns no answer. This deterministic gating produces compact, auditable evidence sets and establishes a clear boundary between relevant text and usable evidence.

Zero-shot named entity recognition (NER) is the task of detecting named entities of specific types (such as 'Person' or 'Medicine') without any training examples. Current research increasingly relies on large synthetic datasets, automatically generated to cover tens of thousands of distinct entity types, to train zero-shot NER models. However, in this paper, we find that these synthetic datasets often contain entity types that are semantically highly similar to (or even the same as) those in standard evaluation benchmarks. Because of this overlap, we argue that reported F1 scores for zero-shot NER overestimate the true capabilities of these approaches. Further, we argue that current evaluation setups provide an incomplete picture of zero-shot abilities since they do not quantify the label shift (i.e., the similarity of labels) between training and evaluation datasets. To address these issues, we propose Familiarity, a novel metric that captures both the semantic similarity between entity types in training and evaluation, as well as their frequency in the training data, to provide an estimate of label shift. It allows researchers to contextualize reported zero-shot NER scores when using custom synthetic training datasets. Further, it enables researchers to generate evaluation setups of various transfer difficulties for fine-grained analysis of zero-shot NER.

Large language models encapsulate knowledge and have demonstrated superior performance on various natural language processing tasks. Recent studies have localized this knowledge to specific model parameters, such as the MLP weights in intermediate layers. This study investigates the differences between entity and relational knowledge through knowledge editing. Our findings reveal that entity and relational knowledge cannot be directly transferred or mapped to each other. This result is unexpected, as logically, modifying the entity or the relation within the same knowledge triplet should yield equivalent outcomes. To further elucidate the differences between entity and relational knowledge, we employ causal analysis to investigate how relational knowledge is stored in pre-trained models. Contrary to prior research suggesting that knowledge is stored in MLP weights, our experiments demonstrate that relational knowledge is also significantly encoded in attention modules. This insight highlights the multifaceted nature of knowledge storage in language models, underscoring the complexity of manipulating specific types of knowledge within these models.

In this work, we focus on the problem of retrieving relevant arguments for a query claim covering diverse aspects. State-of-the-art methods rely on explicit mappings between claims and premises, and thus are unable to utilize large available collections of premises without laborious and costly manual annotation. Their diversity approach relies on removing duplicates via clustering which does not directly ensure that the selected premises cover all aspects. This work introduces a new multi-step approach for the argument retrieval problem. Rather than relying on ground-truth assignments, our approach employs a machine learning model to capture semantic relationships between arguments. Beyond that, it aims to cover diverse facets of the query, instead of trying to identify duplicates explicitly. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that our approach leads to a significant improvement in the argument retrieval task even though it requires less data.

Dense retrieval has become a prominent method to obtain relevant context or world knowledge in open-domain NLP tasks. When we use a learned dense retriever on a retrieval corpus at inference time, an often-overlooked design choice is the retrieval unit in which the corpus is indexed, e.g. document, passage, or sentence. We discover that the retrieval unit choice significantly impacts the performance of both retrieval and downstream tasks. Distinct from the typical approach of using passages or sentences, we introduce a novel retrieval unit, proposition, for dense retrieval. Propositions are defined as atomic expressions within text, each encapsulating a distinct factoid and presented in a concise, self-contained natural language format. We conduct an empirical comparison of different retrieval granularity. Our results reveal that proposition-based retrieval significantly outperforms traditional passage or sentence-based methods in dense retrieval. Moreover, retrieval by proposition also enhances the performance of downstream QA tasks, since the retrieved texts are more condensed with question-relevant information, reducing the need for lengthy input tokens and minimizing the inclusion of extraneous, irrelevant information.

Open Information Extraction (OIE) methods extract facts from natural language text in the form of ("subject"; "relation"; "object") triples. These facts are, however, merely surface forms, the ambiguity of which impedes their downstream usage; e.g., the surface phrase "Michael Jordan" may refer to either the former basketball player or the university professor. Knowledge Graphs (KGs), on the other hand, contain facts in a canonical (i.e., unambiguous) form, but their coverage is limited by a static schema (i.e., a fixed set of entities and predicates). To bridge this gap, we need the best of both worlds: (i) high coverage of free-text OIEs, and (ii) semantic precision (i.e., monosemy) of KGs. In order to achieve this goal, we propose a new benchmark with novel evaluation protocols that can, for example, measure fact linking performance on a granular triple slot level, while also measuring if a system has the ability to recognize that a surface form has no match in the existing KG. Our extensive evaluation of several baselines show that detection of out-of-KG entities and predicates is more difficult than accurate linking to existing ones, thus calling for more research efforts on this difficult task. We publicly release all resources (data, benchmark and code) on https://github.com/nec-research/fact-linking.

Code clone detection is a critical task in software engineering, aimed at identifying duplicated or similar code fragments within or across software systems. Traditional methods often fail to capture functional equivalence, particularly for semantic clones (Type 4), where code fragments implement identical functionality despite differing syntactic structures. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in understanding code semantics. However, directly applying LLMs to code clone detection yields suboptimal results due to their sensitivity to syntactic differences. To address these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage framework that combines LLM-based screening with execution-based validation for detecting semantic clones in Python programs. In the first stage, an LLM evaluates code pairs to filter out obvious non-clones based on semantic analysis. For pairs not identified as clones, the second stage employs an execution-based validation approach, utilizing LLM-generated test inputs to assess functional equivalence through cross-execution validation. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates significant improvements in precision, recall, and F1-score compared to direct LLM-based detection, highlighting the framework's effectiveness in identifying semantic clones. Future work includes exploring cross-language clone detection and optimizing the framework for large-scale applications.

Data contamination poses a significant challenge to the fairness of LLM evaluations in natural language processing tasks by inadvertently exposing models to test data during training. Current studies attempt to mitigate this issue by modifying existing datasets or generating new ones from freshly collected information. However, these methods fall short of ensuring contamination-resilient evaluation, as they fail to fully eliminate pre-existing knowledge from models or preserve the semantic complexity of the original datasets. To address these limitations, we propose CoreEval, a Contamination-resilient Evaluation strategy for automatically updating data with real-world knowledge. This approach begins by extracting entity relationships from the original data and leveraging the GDELT database to retrieve relevant, up-to-date knowledge. The retrieved knowledge is then recontextualized and integrated with the original data, which is refined and restructured to ensure semantic coherence and enhanced task relevance. Ultimately, a robust data reflection mechanism is employed to iteratively verify and refine labels, ensuring consistency between the updated and original datasets. Extensive experiments on updated datasets validate the robustness of CoreEval, demonstrating its effectiveness in mitigating performance overestimation caused by data contamination.

We present a detailed replication study of the BASS framework, an abstractive summarization system based on the notion of Unified Semantic Graphs. Our investigation includes challenges in replicating key components and an ablation study to systematically isolate error sources rooted in replicating novel components. Our findings reveal discrepancies in performance compared to the original work. We highlight the significance of paying careful attention even to reasonably omitted details for replicating advanced frameworks like BASS, and emphasize key practices for writing replicable papers.

In this work, we aim to connect two research areas: instruction models and retrieval-based models. While instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at extracting information from text, they are not suitable for semantic retrieval. Similarity search over embedding vectors allows to index and query vectors, but the similarity reflected in the embedding is sub-optimal for many use cases. We identify the task of retrieving sentences based on abstract descriptions of their content. We demonstrate the inadequacy of current text embeddings and propose an alternative model that significantly improves when used in standard nearest neighbor search. The model is trained using positive and negative pairs sourced through prompting an a large language model (LLM). While it is easy to source the training material from an LLM, the retrieval task cannot be performed by the LLM directly. This demonstrates that data from LLMs can be used not only for distilling more efficient specialized models than the original LLM, but also for creating new capabilities not immediately possible using the original model.

Language models are running out of high-quality training data, and even aggressively deduplicated corpora retain some amount of repetition. Earlier controlled studies predated Chinchilla-style scaling laws and could only measure the cost of repetition indirectly. We revisit repetition in the Chinchilla era, using a fitted no-repetition scaling law to report Compute-Equivalent Gain and Compute-Equivalent Loss. We show that under this modernized paradigm, repetition damage is systematic in three ways. First, holding compute allocated to repeated data constant, eval loss peaks at an intermediate repeat count Rep; repeating a moderately sized subset a moderate number of times damages performance more than repeating a large subset a few times or a small subset many times. Second, the location of this peak is well-fit by a power law in model size; this scaling law reveals that the most damaging number of repeated data grows more quickly than compute. Finally, when repeated documents consume 10\% of the FLOPs budget in a controlled exact-document repetition setting, the compute-equivalent loss can be large: on FineWeb-Edu-Dedup, the most damaging repeat count for a Qwen3-style 344M-parameter model at OT=1 matches the loss of a no-repetition run using 67% of the FLOPs. We demonstrate that these phenomena are not language-model-specific, and can be analytically understood in a simple statistical model: a misspecified linear regression with verbatim duplicates reproduces the same qualitative loss peak, quantifying how such peaks can arise from a statistical tradeoff between memorization and generalization. Our findings add precision to the study of duplication in language models, allowing practitioners to quantify the wasted compute incurred by the presence and repeat structure of duplicates in pretraining corpora.

Entity matching (EM) is the most critical step for entity resolution (ER). While current deep learningbased methods achieve very impressive performance on standard EM benchmarks, their realworld application performance is much frustrating. In this paper, we highlight that such the gap between reality and ideality stems from the unreasonable benchmark construction process, which is inconsistent with the nature of entity matching and therefore leads to biased evaluations of current EM approaches. To this end, we build a new EM corpus and re-construct EM benchmarks to challenge critical assumptions implicit in the previous benchmark construction process by step-wisely changing the restricted entities, balanced labels, and single-modal records in previous benchmarks into open entities, imbalanced labels, and multimodal records in an open environment. Experimental results demonstrate that the assumptions made in the previous benchmark construction process are not coincidental with the open environment, which conceal the main challenges of the task and therefore significantly overestimate the current progress of entity matching. The constructed benchmarks and code are publicly released

Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval (RIR) targets retrieval settings where relevance is mediated by latent inferential links between a query and supporting evidence, rather than semantic similarity. Motivated by the emergent reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent work integrates these capabilities into the IR field, spanning the entire pipeline from benchmarks to retrievers and rerankers. Despite this progress, the field lacks a systematic framework to organize current efforts and articulate a clear path forward. To provide a clear roadmap for this rapidly growing yet fragmented area, this survey (1) systematizes existing RIR benchmarks by knowledge domains and modalities, providing a detailed analysis of the current landscape; (2) introduces a structured taxonomy that categorizes methods based on where and how reasoning is integrated into the retrieval pipeline, alongside an analysis of their trade-offs and practical applications; and (3) summarizes challenges and future directions to guide research in this evolving field.

The exponential growth of knowledge and the increasing complexity of interdisciplinary research pose significant challenges for researchers, including information overload and difficulties in exploring novel ideas. The advancements in large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have shown great potential in enhancing idea proposals, but how to effectively utilize large models for reasonable idea proposal has not been thoroughly explored. This paper proposes a scientific paper idea proposer (SciPIP). Based on a user-provided research background, SciPIP retrieves helpful papers from a literature database while leveraging the capabilities of LLMs to generate more novel and feasible ideas. To this end, 1) we construct a literature retrieval database, extracting lots of papers' multi-dimension information for fast access. Then, a literature retrieval method based on semantics, entity, and citation co-occurrences is proposed to search relevant literature from multiple aspects based on the user-provided background. 2) After literature retrieval, we introduce dual-path idea proposal strategies, where one path infers solutions from the retrieved literature and the other path generates original ideas through model brainstorming. We then combine the two to achieve a good balance between feasibility and originality. Through extensive experiments on the natural language processing (NLP) field, we demonstrate that SciPIP can retrieve citations similar to those of existing top conference papers and generate many ideas consistent with them. Additionally, we evaluate the originality of other ideas generated by SciPIP using large language models, further validating the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code and the database are released at https://github.com/cheerss/SciPIP.

Entity linking is a prominent thread of research focused on structured data creation by linking spans of text to an ontology or knowledge source. We revisit the use of structured prediction for entity linking which classifies each individual input token as an entity, and aggregates the token predictions. Our system, called SpEL (Structured prediction for Entity Linking) is a state-of-the-art entity linking system that uses some new ideas to apply structured prediction to the task of entity linking including: two refined fine-tuning steps; a context sensitive prediction aggregation strategy; reduction of the size of the model's output vocabulary, and; we address a common problem in entity-linking systems where there is a training vs. inference tokenization mismatch. Our experiments show that we can outperform the state-of-the-art on the commonly used AIDA benchmark dataset for entity linking to Wikipedia. Our method is also very compute efficient in terms of number of parameters and speed of inference.

This paper introduces a conceptually simple, scalable, and highly effective BERT-based entity linking model, along with an extensive evaluation of its accuracy-speed trade-off. We present a two-stage zero-shot linking algorithm, where each entity is defined only by a short textual description. The first stage does retrieval in a dense space defined by a bi-encoder that independently embeds the mention context and the entity descriptions. Each candidate is then re-ranked with a cross-encoder, that concatenates the mention and entity text. Experiments demonstrate that this approach is state of the art on recent zero-shot benchmarks (6 point absolute gains) and also on more established non-zero-shot evaluations (e.g. TACKBP-2010), despite its relative simplicity (e.g. no explicit entity embeddings or manually engineered mention tables). We also show that bi-encoder linking is very fast with nearest neighbour search (e.g. linking with 5.9 million candidates in 2 milliseconds), and that much of the accuracy gain from the more expensive cross-encoder can be transferred to the bi-encoder via knowledge distillation. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/BLINK.

In this paper, we present DuReader_retrieval, a large-scale Chinese dataset for passage retrieval. DuReader_retrieval contains more than 90K queries and over 8M unique passages from a commercial search engine. To alleviate the shortcomings of other datasets and ensure the quality of our benchmark, we (1) reduce the false negatives in development and test sets by manually annotating results pooled from multiple retrievers, and (2) remove the training queries that are semantically similar to the development and testing queries. Additionally, we provide two out-of-domain testing sets for cross-domain evaluation, as well as a set of human translated queries for for cross-lingual retrieval evaluation. The experiments demonstrate that DuReader_retrieval is challenging and a number of problems remain unsolved, such as the salient phrase mismatch and the syntactic mismatch between queries and paragraphs. These experiments also show that dense retrievers do not generalize well across domains, and cross-lingual retrieval is essentially challenging. DuReader_retrieval is publicly available at https://github.com/baidu/DuReader/tree/master/DuReader-Retrieval.

Open Named Entity Recognition (NER), which involves identifying arbitrary types of entities from arbitrary domains, remains challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent studies suggest that fine-tuning LLMs on extensive NER data can boost their performance. However, training directly on existing datasets faces issues due to inconsistent entity definitions and redundant data, limiting LLMs to dataset-specific learning and hindering out-of-domain generalization. To address this, we present B2NERD, a cohesive and efficient dataset for Open NER, normalized from 54 existing English or Chinese datasets using a two-step approach. First, we detect inconsistent entity definitions across datasets and clarify them by distinguishable label names to construct a universal taxonomy of 400+ entity types. Second, we address redundancy using a data pruning strategy that selects fewer samples with greater category and semantic diversity. Comprehensive evaluation shows that B2NERD significantly improves LLMs' generalization on Open NER. Our B2NER models, trained on B2NERD, outperform GPT-4 by 6.8-12.0 F1 points and surpass previous methods in 3 out-of-domain benchmarks across 15 datasets and 6 languages.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning through search algorithms, yet current strategies often suffer from massive token consumption due to redundant exploration of semantically equivalent steps. Existing semantic similarity methods struggle to accurately identify such equivalence in domain-specific contexts like mathematical reasoning. To address this, we propose EquivPruner, a simple yet effective approach that identifies and prunes semantically equivalent actions during LLM reasoning search. We also introduce MathEquiv, the first dataset we created for mathematical statement equivalence, which enables the training of a lightweight equivalence detector. Extensive experiments across various models and tasks demonstrate that EquivPruner significantly reduces token consumption, improving searching efficiency and often bolstering reasoning accuracy. For instance, when applied to Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct on GSM8K, EquivPruner reduced token consumption by 48.1\% while also improving accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lolo1222/EquivPruner.

The effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) is often hindered by duplicated data in their extensive pre-training datasets. Current approaches primarily focus on detecting and removing duplicates, which risks the loss of valuable information and neglects the varying degrees of duplication. To address this, we propose a soft deduplication method that maintains dataset integrity while selectively reducing the sampling weight of data with high commonness. Central to our approach is the concept of "data commonness", a metric we introduce to quantify the degree of duplication by measuring the occurrence probabilities of samples using an n-gram model. Empirical analysis shows that this method significantly improves training efficiency, achieving comparable perplexity scores with at least a 26% reduction in required training steps. Additionally, it enhances average few-shot downstream accuracy by 1.77% when trained for an equivalent duration. Importantly, this approach consistently improves performance, even on rigorously deduplicated datasets, indicating its potential to complement existing methods and become a standard pre-training process for LLMs.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) gives agents access to accumulated knowledge, but has no model of time. When a fact changes (e.g., a function is renamed or API restructured), RAG retrieves both the stale and current value with near-identical embedding similarity. The agent then either abstains or serves the superseded fact. We show this is a structural problem: on a calibrated dataset, cosine similarity distinguishes a contradicted fact from a duplicated one with AUROC 0.59 (near chance), as contradictions are often more embedding-similar to the original than rephrased duplicates. We present MemStrata, a retrieval memory maintaining temporal validity. It stores facts like RAG, preserving static recall, but when a fact's value is contradicted, a deterministic (subject, relation, object) supersession rule retires the stale value in a bi-temporal ledger - with no similarity threshold and no LLM call. Across six benchmarks run locally with a 7B model, MemStrata ties RAG on static knowledge and reaches 0.95-1.00 accuracy on evolving knowledge (where RAG reaches 0.20-0.47). The central result is the stale-fact-error rate: when required to answer, RAG serves superseded values 15-40% of the time; MemStrata drives this to ~0%, a failure class RAG cannot avoid. MemStrata achieves this at retrieval latency (~2.1s) versus ~16-18s for LLM-reranking baselines. We release the harness, datasets, and a marker-free evaluation protocol for memory under knowledge evolution.

Large language model (LLM)-based agentic search systems are often evaluated as if the underlying LLM were the only component that matters, yet their measured performance also depends on the surrounding search environment: the Wikipedia snapshot, preprocessing pipeline, chunking policy, retrieval backend, tool schema, observation format, and answer submission rule. These details are frequently under-specified, making it difficult to compare results or reproduce reported baselines. We present SimpleWikiSearch, whose corpus construction, retrieval stack, tool contract, and evaluation protocol are explicit and runnable. The environment starts from a full English Wikipedia dump, cleans and chunks the corpus, builds keyword and dense retrieval indexes, and exposes a minimal tool interface consisting of search, open\_url, and submit\_answer. We report baseline results on six QA datasets using open-source LLMs and provide a random-300 subset for comparisons with closed-source commercial models. SimpleWikiSearch provides a domain-specific agent harness and a controlled offline environment for reproducible agentic-search evaluation. Its contribution is this specified reference setup, rather than a new agent algorithm. Code and data will be available at: https://github.com/JimXiongGM/simple_wiki_search.

The limited generalization of coreference resolution (CR) models has been a major bottleneck in the task's broad application. Prior work has identified annotation differences, especially for mention detection, as one of the main reasons for the generalization gap and proposed using additional annotated target domain data. Rather than relying on this additional annotation, we propose an alternative referential task, Major Entity Identification (MEI), where we: (a) assume the target entities to be specified in the input, and (b) limit the task to only the frequent entities. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MEI models generalize well across domains on multiple datasets with supervised models and LLM-based few-shot prompting. Additionally, MEI fits the classification framework, which enables the use of robust and intuitive classification-based metrics. Finally, MEI is also of practical use as it allows a user to search for all mentions of a particular entity or a group of entities of interest.

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) has created an urgent need for robust tools to detect LLM-generated text, especially in light of paraphrasing techniques that often evade existing detection methods. To address this challenge, we present a novel semantic-enhanced framework for detecting LLM-generated text (SEFD) that leverages a retrieval-based mechanism to fully utilize text semantics. Our framework improves upon existing detection methods by systematically integrating retrieval-based techniques with traditional detectors, employing a carefully curated retrieval mechanism that strikes a balance between comprehensive coverage and computational efficiency. We showcase the effectiveness of our approach in sequential text scenarios common in real-world applications, such as online forums and Q\&A platforms. Through comprehensive experiments across various LLM-generated texts and detection methods, we demonstrate that our framework substantially enhances detection accuracy in paraphrasing scenarios while maintaining robustness for standard LLM-generated content.

The procure to pay process (P2P) in large enterprises is a back-end business process which deals with the procurement of products and services for enterprise operations. Procurement is done by issuing purchase orders to impaneled vendors and invoices submitted by vendors are paid after they go through a rigorous validation process. Agents orchestrating P2P process often encounter the problem of matching a product or service descriptions in the invoice to those in purchase order and verify if the ordered items are what have been supplied or serviced. For example, the description in the invoice and purchase order could be TRES 739mL CD KER Smooth and TRES 0.739L CD KER Smth which look different at word level but refer to the same item. In a typical P2P process, agents are asked to manually select the products which are similar before invoices are posted for payment. This step in the business process is manual, repetitive, cumbersome, and costly. Since descriptions are not well-formed sentences, we cannot apply existing semantic and syntactic text similarity approaches directly. In this paper, we present two approaches to solve the above problem using various types of available agent's recorded feedback data. If the agent's feedback is in the form of a relative ranking between descriptions, we use similarity ranking algorithm. If the agent's feedback is absolute such as match or no-match, we use classification similarity algorithm. We also present the threats to the validity of our approach and present a possible remedy making use of product taxonomy and catalog. We showcase the comparative effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches over many benchmarks and real-world data sets.

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving relevant code given a natural language query. While related to other information retrieval tasks, it requires bridging the gap between the language used in code (often abbreviated and highly technical) and natural language more suitable to describe vague concepts and ideas. To enable evaluation of progress on code search, we are releasing the CodeSearchNet Corpus and are presenting the CodeSearchNet Challenge, which consists of 99 natural language queries with about 4k expert relevance annotations of likely results from CodeSearchNet Corpus. The corpus contains about 6 million functions from open-source code spanning six programming languages (Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby). The CodeSearchNet Corpus also contains automatically generated query-like natural language for 2 million functions, obtained from mechanically scraping and preprocessing associated function documentation. In this article, we describe the methodology used to obtain the corpus and expert labels, as well as a number of simple baseline solutions for the task. We hope that CodeSearchNet Challenge encourages researchers and practitioners to study this interesting task further and will host a competition and leaderboard to track the progress on the challenge. We are also keen on extending CodeSearchNet Challenge to more queries and programming languages in the future.

We describe a dataset developed for Named Entity Recognition in German federal court decisions. It consists of approx. 67,000 sentences with over 2 million tokens. The resource contains 54,000 manually annotated entities, mapped to 19 fine-grained semantic classes: person, judge, lawyer, country, city, street, landscape, organization, company, institution, court, brand, law, ordinance, European legal norm, regulation, contract, court decision, and legal literature. The legal documents were, furthermore, automatically annotated with more than 35,000 TimeML-based time expressions. The dataset, which is available under a CC-BY 4.0 license in the CoNNL-2002 format, was developed for training an NER service for German legal documents in the EU project Lynx.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a vital technique to enhance factual accuracy by integrating external knowledge into the generation process. However, LLMs often fail to faithfully integrate retrieved evidence into their generated responses, leading to factual inconsistencies. To quantify this gap, we introduce Entity-Context Divergence (ECD), a metric that measures the extent to which retrieved information is accurately reflected in model outputs. We systematically evaluate contemporary LLMs on their ability to preserve factual consistency in retrieval-augmented settings, a capability we define as RAG-ability. Our empirical analysis reveals that RAG-ability remains low across most LLMs, highlighting significant challenges in entity retention and context fidelity. This paper introduces Radiant (Retrieval AugmenteD entIty-context AligNmenT), a novel framework that merges RAG with alignment designed to optimize the interplay between retrieved evidence and generated content. Radiant extends Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to teach LLMs how to integrate provided additional information into subsequent generations. As a behavior correction mechanism, Radiant boosts RAG performance across varied retrieval scenarios, such as noisy web contexts, knowledge conflicts, and hallucination reduction. This enables more reliable, contextually grounded, and factually coherent content generation.

Despite their wide adoption, the biases and unintended behaviors of language models remain poorly understood. In this paper, we identify and characterize a phenomenon never discussed before, which we call semantic leakage, where models leak irrelevant information from the prompt into the generation in unexpected ways. We propose an evaluation setting to detect semantic leakage both by humans and automatically, curate a diverse test suite for diagnosing this behavior, and measure significant semantic leakage in 13 flagship models. We also show that models exhibit semantic leakage in languages besides English and across different settings and generation scenarios. This discovery highlights yet another type of bias in language models that affects their generation patterns and behavior.

This paper presents a domain-specific implementation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) tailored to the Fair Use Doctrine in U.S. copyright law. Motivated by the increasing prevalence of DMCA takedowns and the lack of accessible legal support for content creators, we propose a structured approach that combines semantic search with legal knowledge graphs and court citation networks to improve retrieval quality and reasoning reliability. Our prototype models legal precedents at the statutory factor level (e.g., purpose, nature, amount, market effect) and incorporates citation-weighted graph representations to prioritize doctrinally authoritative sources. We use Chain-of-Thought reasoning and interleaved retrieval steps to better emulate legal reasoning. Preliminary testing suggests this method improves doctrinal relevance in the retrieval process, laying groundwork for future evaluation and deployment of LLM-based legal assistance tools.

In this work, we dive into the fundamental challenges of evaluating Text2SQL solutions and highlight potential failure causes and the potential risks of relying on aggregate metrics in existing benchmarks. We identify two largely unaddressed limitations in current open benchmarks: (1) data quality issues in the evaluation data, mainly attributed to the lack of capturing the probabilistic nature of translating a natural language description into a structured query (e.g., NL ambiguity), and (2) the bias introduced by using different match functions as approximations for SQL equivalence. To put both limitations into context, we propose a unified taxonomy of all Text2SQL limitations that can lead to both prediction and evaluation errors. We then motivate the taxonomy by providing a survey of Text2SQL limitations using state-of-the-art Text2SQL solutions and benchmarks. We describe the causes of limitations with real-world examples and propose potential mitigation solutions for each category in the taxonomy. We conclude by highlighting the open challenges encountered when deploying such mitigation strategies or attempting to automatically apply the taxonomy.

We present RONEC - the Named Entity Corpus for the Romanian language. The corpus contains over 26000 entities in ~5000 annotated sentences, belonging to 16 distinct classes. The sentences have been extracted from a copy-right free newspaper, covering several styles. This corpus represents the first initiative in the Romanian language space specifically targeted for named entity recognition. It is available in BRAT and CoNLL-U Plus formats, and it is free to use and extend at github.com/dumitrescustefan/ronec .

We introduce ParaNames, a massively multilingual parallel name resource consisting of 140 million names spanning over 400 languages. Names are provided for 16.8 million entities, and each entity is mapped from a complex type hierarchy to a standard type (PER/LOC/ORG). Using Wikidata as a source, we create the largest resource of this type to date. We describe our approach to filtering and standardizing the data to provide the best quality possible. ParaNames is useful for multilingual language processing, both in defining tasks for name translation/transliteration and as supplementary data for tasks such as named entity recognition and linking. We demonstrate the usefulness of ParaNames on two tasks. First, we perform canonical name translation between English and 17 other languages. Second, we use it as a gazetteer for multilingual named entity recognition, obtaining performance improvements on all 10 languages evaluated.

Retrieval-based language models (R-LM) model the probability of natural language text by combining a standard language model (LM) with examples retrieved from an external datastore at test time. While effective, a major bottleneck of using these models in practice is the computationally costly datastore search, which can be performed as frequently as every time step. In this paper, we present RetoMaton - retrieval automaton - which approximates the datastore search, based on (1) saving pointers between consecutive datastore entries, and (2) clustering of entries into "states". This effectively results in a weighted finite automaton built on top of the datastore, instead of representing the datastore as a flat list. The creation of the automaton is unsupervised, and a RetoMaton can be constructed from any text collection: either the original training corpus or from another domain. Traversing this automaton at inference time, in parallel to the LM inference, reduces its perplexity by up to 1.85, or alternatively saves up to 83% of the nearest neighbor searches over kNN-LM (Khandelwal et al., 2020) without hurting perplexity. Our code and trained models are available at https://github.com/neulab/retomaton .

Automatically highlighting words that cause semantic differences between two documents could be useful for a wide range of applications. We formulate recognizing semantic differences (RSD) as a token-level regression task and study three unsupervised approaches that rely on a masked language model. To assess the approaches, we begin with basic English sentences and gradually move to more complex, cross-lingual document pairs. Our results show that an approach based on word alignment and sentence-level contrastive learning has a robust correlation to gold labels. However, all unsupervised approaches still leave a large margin of improvement. Code to reproduce our experiments is available at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/recognizing-semantic-differences

Enterprises often own large collections of structured data in the form of large databases or an enterprise data lake. Such data collections come with limited metadata and strict access policies that could limit access to the data contents and, therefore, limit the application of classic retrieval and analysis solutions. As a result, there is a need for solutions that can effectively utilize the available metadata. In this paper, we study the problem of matching table metadata to a business glossary containing data labels and descriptions. The resulting matching enables the use of an available or curated business glossary for retrieval and analysis without or before requesting access to the data contents. One solution to this problem is to use manually-defined rules or similarity measures on column names and glossary descriptions (or their vector embeddings) to find the closest match. However, such approaches need to be tuned through manual labeling and cannot handle many business glossaries that contain a combination of simple as well as complex and long descriptions. In this work, we leverage the power of large language models (LLMs) to design generic matching methods that do not require manual tuning and can identify complex relations between column names and glossaries. We propose methods that utilize LLMs in two ways: a) by generating additional context for column names that can aid with matching b) by using LLMs to directly infer if there is a relation between column names and glossary descriptions. Our preliminary experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

Understanding a long document requires tracking how entities are introduced and evolve over time. We present a new type of language model, EntityNLM, that can explicitly model entities, dynamically update their representations, and contextually generate their mentions. Our model is generative and flexible; it can model an arbitrary number of entities in context while generating each entity mention at an arbitrary length. In addition, it can be used for several different tasks such as language modeling, coreference resolution, and entity prediction. Experimental results with all these tasks demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms strong baselines and prior work.

Tasking machines with understanding receipts can have important applications such as enabling detailed analytics on purchases, enforcing expense policies, and inferring patterns of purchase behavior on large collections of receipts. In this paper, we focus on the task of Named Entity Linking (NEL) of scanned receipt line items; specifically, the task entails associating shorthand text from OCR'd receipts with a knowledge base (KB) of grocery products. For example, the scanned item "STO BABY SPINACH" should be linked to the catalog item labeled "Simple Truth Organic Baby Spinach". Experiments that employ a variety of Information Retrieval techniques in combination with statistical phrase detection shows promise for effective understanding of scanned receipt data.

Entity Alignment (EA) seeks to identify and match corresponding entities across different Knowledge Graphs (KGs), playing a crucial role in knowledge fusion and integration. Embedding-based entity alignment (EA) has recently gained considerable attention, resulting in the emergence of many innovative approaches. Initially, these approaches concentrated on learning entity embeddings based on the structural features of knowledge graphs (KGs) as defined by relation triples. Subsequent methods have integrated entities' names and attributes as supplementary information to improve the embeddings used for EA. However, existing methods lack a deep semantic understanding of entity attributes and relations. In this paper, we propose a Large Language Model (LLM) based Entity Alignment method, LLM-Align, which explores the instruction-following and zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models to infer alignments of entities. LLM-Align uses heuristic methods to select important attributes and relations of entities, and then feeds the selected triples of entities to an LLM to infer the alignment results. To guarantee the quality of alignment results, we design a multi-round voting mechanism to mitigate the hallucination and positional bias issues that occur with LLMs. Experiments on three EA datasets, demonstrating that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing EA methods.

We introduce semantic towers, an extrinsic knowledge representation method, and compare it to intrinsic knowledge in large language models for ontology learning. Our experiments show a trade-off between performance and semantic grounding for extrinsic knowledge compared to a fine-tuned model intrinsic knowledge. We report our findings on the Large Language Models for Ontology Learning (LLMs4OL) 2024 challenge.

Most available semantic parsing datasets, comprising of pairs of natural utterances and logical forms, were collected solely for the purpose of training and evaluation of natural language understanding systems. As a result, they do not contain any of the richness and variety of natural-occurring utterances, where humans ask about data they need or are curious about. In this work, we release SEDE, a dataset with 12,023 pairs of utterances and SQL queries collected from real usage on the Stack Exchange website. We show that these pairs contain a variety of real-world challenges which were rarely reflected so far in any other semantic parsing dataset, propose an evaluation metric based on comparison of partial query clauses that is more suitable for real-world queries, and conduct experiments with strong baselines, showing a large gap between the performance on SEDE compared to other common datasets.

Joint entity and relation extraction plays a pivotal role in various applications, notably in the construction of knowledge graphs. Despite recent progress, existing approaches often fall short in two key aspects: richness of representation and coherence in output structure. These models often rely on handcrafted heuristics for computing entity and relation representations, potentially leading to loss of crucial information. Furthermore, they disregard task and/or dataset-specific constraints, resulting in output structures that lack coherence. In our work, we introduce EnriCo, which mitigates these shortcomings. Firstly, to foster rich and expressive representation, our model leverage attention mechanisms that allow both entities and relations to dynamically determine the pertinent information required for accurate extraction. Secondly, we introduce a series of decoding algorithms designed to infer the highest scoring solutions while adhering to task and dataset-specific constraints, thus promoting structured and coherent outputs. Our model demonstrates competitive performance compared to baselines when evaluated on Joint IE datasets.

Entity linking (EL) aligns textual mentions with their corresponding entities in a knowledge base, facilitating various applications such as semantic search and question answering. Recent advances in multimodal entity linking (MEL) have shown that combining text and images can reduce ambiguity and improve alignment accuracy. However, most existing MEL methods overlook the rich structural information available in the form of knowledge-graph (KG) triples. In this paper, we propose KGMEL, a novel framework that leverages KG triples to enhance MEL. Specifically, it operates in three stages: (1) Generation: Produces high-quality triples for each mention by employing vision-language models based on its text and images. (2) Retrieval: Learns joint mention-entity representations, via contrastive learning, that integrate text, images, and (generated or KG) triples to retrieve candidate entities for each mention. (3) Reranking: Refines the KG triples of the candidate entities and employs large language models to identify the best-matching entity for the mention. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that KGMEL outperforms existing methods. Our code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/juyeonnn/KGMEL.

We present a corpus of Finnish news articles with a manually prepared named entity annotation. The corpus consists of 953 articles (193,742 word tokens) with six named entity classes (organization, location, person, product, event, and date). The articles are extracted from the archives of Digitoday, a Finnish online technology news source. The corpus is available for research purposes. We present baseline experiments on the corpus using a rule-based and two deep learning systems on two, in-domain and out-of-domain, test sets.

This work investigates the applicability of recent generative Large Language Models (LLMs), such as the GPT series and Flan-T5, to ontology alignment for identifying concept equivalence mappings across ontologies. To test the zero-shot performance of Flan-T5-XXL and GPT-3.5-turbo, we leverage challenging subsets from two equivalence matching datasets of the OAEI Bio-ML track, taking into account concept labels and structural contexts. Preliminary findings suggest that LLMs have the potential to outperform existing ontology alignment systems like BERTMap, given careful framework and prompt design.

PaECTER is a publicly available, open-source document-level encoder specific for patents. We fine-tune BERT for Patents with examiner-added citation information to generate numerical representations for patent documents. PaECTER performs better in similarity tasks than current state-of-the-art models used in the patent domain. More specifically, our model outperforms the next-best patent specific pre-trained language model (BERT for Patents) on our patent citation prediction test dataset on two different rank evaluation metrics. PaECTER predicts at least one most similar patent at a rank of 1.32 on average when compared against 25 irrelevant patents. Numerical representations generated by PaECTER from patent text can be used for downstream tasks such as classification, tracing knowledge flows, or semantic similarity search. Semantic similarity search is especially relevant in the context of prior art search for both inventors and patent examiners. PaECTER is available on Hugging Face.

We present a novel architecture, In-Database Entity Linking (IDEL), in which we integrate the analytics-optimized RDBMS MonetDB with neural text mining abilities. Our system design abstracts core tasks of most neural entity linking systems for MonetDB. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first defacto implemented system integrating entity-linking in a database. We leverage the ability of MonetDB to support in-database-analytics with user defined functions (UDFs) implemented in Python. These functions call machine learning libraries for neural text mining, such as TensorFlow. The system achieves zero cost for data shipping and transformation by utilizing MonetDB's ability to embed Python processes in the database kernel and exchange data in NumPy arrays. IDEL represents text and relational data in a joint vector space with neural embeddings and can compensate errors with ambiguous entity representations. For detecting matching entities, we propose a novel similarity function based on joint neural embeddings which are learned via minimizing pairwise contrastive ranking loss. This function utilizes a high dimensional index structures for fast retrieval of matching entities. Our first implementation and experiments using the WebNLG corpus show the effectiveness and the potentials of IDEL.

Identification of named entities from legal texts is an essential building block for developing other legal Artificial Intelligence applications. Named Entities in legal texts are slightly different and more fine-grained than commonly used named entities like Person, Organization, Location etc. In this paper, we introduce a new corpus of 46545 annotated legal named entities mapped to 14 legal entity types. The Baseline model for extracting legal named entities from judgment text is also developed.

Multimodal entity linking (MEL) is the task that consists of matching textual and visual mentions of entities in unstructured data to their corresponding entities in a knowledge base (KB). To be effective in large-scale practical settings, MEL systems must meet three objectives: high linking accuracy, computational efficiency, and storage efficiency, i.e., a compact yet efficient index of the KB. In this paper, we highlight that state-of-the-art systems fail to simultaneously satisfy these 3 requirements. To meet this three-fold objective, we propose FAST-MEL, a lightweight encoder-based MEL solution that relies on a novel and compact fixed-size vectorized representation of both the textual and visual information of each entity or mention. It matches the accuracy of the best systems but performs three orders of magnitude faster. It also consumes one order of magnitude less storage than the fastest systems.

Formulating selective information needs results in queries that implicitly specify set operations, such as intersection, union, and difference. For instance, one might search for "shorebirds that are not sandpipers" or "science-fiction films shot in England". To study the ability of retrieval systems to meet such information needs, we construct QUEST, a dataset of 3357 natural language queries with implicit set operations, that map to a set of entities corresponding to Wikipedia documents. The dataset challenges models to match multiple constraints mentioned in queries with corresponding evidence in documents and correctly perform various set operations. The dataset is constructed semi-automatically using Wikipedia category names. Queries are automatically composed from individual categories, then paraphrased and further validated for naturalness and fluency by crowdworkers. Crowdworkers also assess the relevance of entities based on their documents and highlight attribution of query constraints to spans of document text. We analyze several modern retrieval systems, finding that they often struggle on such queries. Queries involving negation and conjunction are particularly challenging and systems are further challenged with combinations of these operations.

Finding truly analogous precedents requires capturing legal reasoning beyond surface word overlap. We present a two-stage, section-aware framework for legal case retrieval that first segments raw judgments into facts, issues, decision, and reasoning using a deterministic large language model (LLM) offline. In Stage 1, we combine parallel lexical (BM25) and semantic (dense ANN) whole-document searches via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) to form a high-recall candidate pool. In Stage 2, we perform fine-grained, like-for-like comparisons (e.g., query reasoning vs. candidate reasoning). To address the scale mismatch between unbounded lexical scores and cosine similarities, we apply query-wise Z-score normalization before aggregating signals with learned section weights. For the top results, the system returns the relevant section text with a concise, grounded rationale and party-stance labels. We evaluate on a jurisdiction-scale benchmark, demonstrating consistent gains over strong lexical and neural baselines while maintaining high candidate coverage

Neural entity linking models are very powerful, but run the risk of overfitting to the domain they are trained in. For this problem, a domain is characterized not just by genre of text but even by factors as specific as the particular distribution of entities, as neural models tend to overfit by memorizing properties of frequent entities in a dataset. We tackle the problem of building robust entity linking models that generalize effectively and do not rely on labeled entity linking data with a specific entity distribution. Rather than predicting entities directly, our approach models fine-grained entity properties, which can help disambiguate between even closely related entities. We derive a large inventory of types (tens of thousands) from Wikipedia categories, and use hyperlinked mentions in Wikipedia to distantly label data and train an entity typing model. At test time, we classify a mention with this typing model and use soft type predictions to link the mention to the most similar candidate entity. We evaluate our entity linking system on the CoNLL-YAGO dataset (Hoffart et al., 2011) and show that our approach outperforms prior domain-independent entity linking systems. We also test our approach in a harder setting derived from the WikilinksNED dataset (Eshel et al., 2017) where all the mention-entity pairs are unseen during test time. Results indicate that our approach generalizes better than a state-of-the-art neural model on the dataset.

As large language models become increasingly capable at various writing tasks, their weakness at generating unique and creative content becomes a major liability. Although LLMs have the ability to generate text covering diverse topics, there is an overall sense of repetitiveness across texts that we aim to formalize and quantify via a similarity metric. The familiarity between documents arises from the persistence of underlying discourse structures. However, existing similarity metrics dependent on lexical overlap and syntactic patterns largely capture content overlap, thus making them unsuitable for detecting structural similarities. We introduce an abstraction based on linguistic theories in Questions Under Discussion (QUD) and question semantics to help quantify differences in discourse progression. We then use this framework to build QUDsim, a similarity metric that can detect discursive parallels between documents. Using QUDsim, we find that LLMs often reuse discourse structures (more so than humans) across samples, even when content differs. Furthermore, LLMs are not only repetitive and structurally uniform, but are also divergent from human authors in the types of structures they use.

Entity resolution (record linkage, microclustering) systems are notoriously difficult to evaluate. Looking for a needle in a haystack, traditional evaluation methods use sophisticated, application-specific sampling schemes to find matching pairs of records among an immense number of non-matches. We propose an alternative that facilitates the creation of representative, reusable benchmark data sets without necessitating complex sampling schemes. These benchmark data sets can then be used for model training and a variety of evaluation tasks. Specifically, we propose an entity-centric data labeling methodology that integrates with a unified framework for monitoring summary statistics, estimating key performance metrics such as cluster and pairwise precision and recall, and analyzing root causes for errors. We validate the framework in an application to inventor name disambiguation and through simulation studies. Software: https://github.com/OlivierBinette/er-evaluation/

Scarcity of domain-specific data in the Portuguese financial domain has disfavored the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. To address this limitation, the present study advocates for the utilization of synthetic data generated through data augmentation techniques. The investigation focuses on the augmentation of a dataset sourced from the Central Bank of Brazil FAQ, employing techniques that vary in semantic similarity. Supervised and unsupervised tasks are conducted to evaluate the impact of augmented data on both low and high semantic similarity scenarios. Additionally, the resultant dataset will be publicly disseminated on the Hugging Face Datasets platform, thereby enhancing accessibility and fostering broader engagement within the NLP research community.

Understanding what kinds of factual knowledge large language models (LLMs) memorize is essential for evaluating their reliability and limitations. Entity-based QA is a common framework for analyzing non-verbatim memorization, but typical evaluations query each entity using a single canonical surface form, making it difficult to disentangle fact memorization from access through a particular name. We introduce RedirectQA, an entity-based QA dataset that uses Wikipedia redirect information to associate Wikidata factual triples with categorized surface forms for each entity, including alternative names, abbreviations, spelling variants, and common erroneous forms. Across 13 LLMs, we examine surface-conditioned factual memorization and find that prediction outcomes often change when only the entity surface form changes. This inconsistency is category-dependent: models are more robust to minor orthographic variations than to larger lexical variations such as aliases and abbreviations. Frequency analyses further suggest that both entity- and surface-level frequencies are associated with accuracy, and that entity frequency often contributes beyond surface frequency. Overall, factual memorization appears neither purely surface-specific nor fully surface-invariant, highlighting the importance of surface-form diversity in evaluating non-verbatim memorization.

We present Spider, a large-scale, complex and cross-domain semantic parsing and text-to-SQL dataset annotated by 11 college students. It consists of 10,181 questions and 5,693 unique complex SQL queries on 200 databases with multiple tables, covering 138 different domains. We define a new complex and cross-domain semantic parsing and text-to-SQL task where different complex SQL queries and databases appear in train and test sets. In this way, the task requires the model to generalize well to both new SQL queries and new database schemas. Spider is distinct from most of the previous semantic parsing tasks because they all use a single database and the exact same programs in the train set and the test set. We experiment with various state-of-the-art models and the best model achieves only 12.4% exact matching accuracy on a database split setting. This shows that Spider presents a strong challenge for future research. Our dataset and task are publicly available at https://yale-lily.github.io/spider

This paper demonstrates how the limitations of pre-trained models and open evaluation datasets factor into assessing the performance of binary semantic similarity classification tasks. As (1) end-user-facing documentation around the curation of these datasets and pre-trained model training regimes is often not easily accessible and (2) given the lower friction and higher demand to quickly deploy such systems in real-world contexts, our study reinforces prior work showing performance disparities across datasets, embedding techniques and distance metrics, while highlighting the importance of understanding how data is collected, curated and analyzed in semantic similarity classification.

To better support retrieval applications such as web search and question answering, growing effort is made to develop retrieval-oriented language models. Most of the existing works focus on improving the semantic representation capability for the contextualized embedding of [CLS] token. However, recent study shows that the ordinary tokens besides [CLS] may provide extra information, which helps to produce a better representation effect. As such, it's necessary to extend the current methods where all contextualized embeddings can be jointly pre-trained for the retrieval tasks. With this motivation, we propose a new pre-training method: duplex masked auto-encoder, a.k.a. DupMAE, which targets on improving the semantic representation capacity for the contextualized embeddings of both [CLS] and ordinary tokens. It introduces two decoding tasks: one is to reconstruct the original input sentence based on the [CLS] embedding, the other one is to minimize the bag-of-words loss (BoW) about the input sentence based on the entire ordinary tokens' embeddings. The two decoding losses are added up to train a unified encoding model. The embeddings from [CLS] and ordinary tokens, after dimension reduction and aggregation, are concatenated as one unified semantic representation for the input. DupMAE is simple but empirically competitive: with a small decoding cost, it substantially contributes to the model's representation capability and transferability, where remarkable improvements are achieved on MS MARCO and BEIR benchmarks.

Existing Text-to-SQL generators require the entire schema to be encoded with the user text. This is expensive or impractical for large databases with tens of thousands of columns. Standard dense retrieval techniques are inadequate for schema subsetting of a large structured database, where the correct semantics of retrieval demands that we rank sets of schema elements rather than individual elements. In response, we propose a two-stage process for effective coverage during retrieval. First, we instruct an LLM to hallucinate a minimal DB schema deemed adequate to answer the query. We use the hallucinated schema to retrieve a subset of the actual schema, by composing the results from multiple dense retrievals. Remarkably, hallucination x2013 generally considered a nuisance x2013 turns out to be actually useful as a bridging mechanism. Since no existing benchmarks exist for schema subsetting on large databases, we introduce three benchmarks. Two semi-synthetic datasets are derived from the union of schemas in two well-known datasets, SPIDER and BIRD, resulting in 4502 and 798 schema elements respectively. A real-life benchmark called SocialDB is sourced from an actual large data warehouse comprising 17844 schema elements. We show that our method1 leads to significantly higher recall than SOTA retrieval-based augmentation methods.

Transformer-based table retrieval systems flatten structured tables into token sequences, making retrieval sensitive to the choice of serialization even when table semantics remain unchanged. We show that semantically equivalent serializations, such as csv, tsv, html, markdown, and ddl, can produce substantially different embeddings and retrieval results across multiple benchmarks and retriever families. To address this instability, we treat serialization embedding as noisy views of a shared semantic signal and use its centroid as a canonical target representation. We show that centroid averaging suppresses format-specific variation and can recover the semantic content common to different serializations when format-induced shifts differ across tables. Empirically, centroid representations outrank individual formats in aggregate pairwise comparisons across MPNet, BGE-M3, ReasonIR, and SPLADE. We further introduce a lightweight residual bottleneck adapter on top of a frozen encoder that maps single-serialization embeddings towards centroid targets while preserving variance and enforcing covariance regularization. The adapter improves robustness for several dense retrievers, though gains are model-dependent and weaker for sparse lexical retrieval. These results identify serialization sensitivity as a major source of retrieval variance and show the promise of post hoc geometric correction for serialization-invariant table retrieval. Our code, datasets, and models are available at https://github.com/KBhandari11/Centroid-Aligned-Table-Retrieval{https://github.com/KBhandari11/Centroid-Aligned-Table-Retrieval}.

Community Question Answering (CQA) in different domains is growing at a large scale because of the availability of several platforms and huge shareable information among users. With the rapid growth of such online platforms, a massive amount of archived data makes it difficult for moderators to retrieve possible duplicates for a new question and identify and confirm existing question pairs as duplicates at the right time. This problem is even more critical in CQAs corresponding to large software systems like askubuntu where moderators need to be experts to comprehend something as a duplicate. Note that the prime challenge in such CQA platforms is that the moderators are themselves experts and are therefore usually extremely busy with their time being extraordinarily expensive. To facilitate the task of the moderators, in this work, we have tackled two significant issues for the askubuntu CQA platform: (1) retrieval of duplicate questions given a new question and (2) duplicate question confirmation time prediction. In the first task, we focus on retrieving duplicate questions from a question pool for a particular newly posted question. In the second task, we solve a regression problem to rank a pair of questions that could potentially take a long time to get confirmed as duplicates. For duplicate question retrieval, we propose a Siamese neural network based approach by exploiting both text and network-based features, which outperforms several state-of-the-art baseline techniques. Our method outperforms DupPredictor and DUPE by 5% and 7% respectively. For duplicate confirmation time prediction, we have used both the standard machine learning models and neural network along with the text and graph-based features. We obtain Spearman's rank correlation of 0.20 and 0.213 (statistically significant) for text and graph based features respectively.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can be seen as compressed knowledge bases, but it remains unclear what knowledge they truly contain and how far their knowledge boundaries extend. Existing benchmarks are mostly static and provide limited support for systematic knowledge probing. In this paper, we propose an interactive agentic framework to systematically extract and quantify the knowledge of LLMs. Our method includes four adaptive exploration policies to probe knowledge at different granularities. To ensure the quality of extracted knowledge, we introduce a three-stage knowledge processing pipeline that combines vector-based filtering to remove exact duplicates, LLM-based adjudication to resolve ambiguous semantic overlaps, and domain-relevance auditing to retain valid knowledge units. Through extensive experiments, we find that recursive taxonomy is the most effective exploration strategy. We also observe a clear knowledge scaling law, where larger models consistently extract more knowledge. In addition, we identify a Pass@1-versus-Pass@k trade-off: domain-specialized models achieve higher initial accuracy but degrade rapidly, while general-purpose models maintain stable performance during extended extraction. Finally, our results show that differences in training data composition lead to distinct and measurable knowledge profiles across model families.

Retrieval module can be plugged into many downstream NLP tasks to improve their performance, such as open-domain question answering and retrieval-augmented generation. The key to a retrieval system is to calculate relevance scores to query and passage pairs. However, the definition of relevance is often ambiguous. We observed that a major class of relevance aligns with the concept of entailment in NLI tasks. Based on this observation, we designed a method called entailment tuning to improve the embedding of dense retrievers. Specifically, we unify the form of retrieval data and NLI data using existence claim as a bridge. Then, we train retrievers to predict the claims entailed in a passage with a variant task of masked prediction. Our method can be efficiently plugged into current dense retrieval methods, and experiments show the effectiveness of our method.

Entity Linking (EL) models are well-trained at mapping mentions to their corresponding entities according to a given context. However, EL models struggle to disambiguate long-tail entities due to their limited training data. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) are more robust at interpreting uncommon mentions. Yet, due to a lack of specialized training, LLMs suffer at generating correct entity IDs. Furthermore, training an LLM to perform EL is cost-intensive. Building upon these insights, we introduce LLM-Augmented Entity Linking LLMAEL, a plug-and-play approach to enhance entity linking through LLM data augmentation. We leverage LLMs as knowledgeable context augmenters, generating mention-centered descriptions as additional input, while preserving traditional EL models for task specific processing. Experiments on 6 standard datasets show that the vanilla LLMAEL outperforms baseline EL models in most cases, while the fine-tuned LLMAEL set the new state-of-the-art results across all 6 benchmarks.