Scalable and Domain-General Abstractive Proposition Segmentation

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Main Authors: Hosseini, Mohammad Javad, Gao, Yang, Baumgärtner, Tim, Fabrikant, Alex, Amplayo, Reinald Kim
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Hosseini, Mohammad Javad
Gao, Yang
Baumgärtner, Tim
Fabrikant, Alex
Amplayo, Reinald Kim
author_facet Hosseini, Mohammad Javad
Gao, Yang
Baumgärtner, Tim
Fabrikant, Alex
Amplayo, Reinald Kim
contents Segmenting text into fine-grained units of meaning is important to a wide range of NLP applications. The default approach of segmenting text into sentences is often insufficient, especially since sentences are usually complex enough to include multiple units of meaning that merit separate treatment in the downstream task. We focus on the task of abstractive proposition segmentation (APS): transforming text into simple, self-contained, well-formed sentences. Several recent works have demonstrated the utility of proposition segmentation with few-shot prompted LLMs for downstream tasks such as retrieval-augmented grounding and fact verification. However, this approach does not scale to large amounts of text and may not always extract all the facts from the input text. In this paper, we first introduce evaluation metrics for the task to measure several dimensions of quality. We then propose a scalable, yet accurate, proposition segmentation model. We model proposition segmentation as a supervised task by training LLMs on existing annotated datasets and show that training yields significantly improved results. We further show that by using the fine-tuned LLMs (Gemini Pro and Gemini Ultra) as teachers for annotating large amounts of multi-domain synthetic distillation data, we can train smaller student models (Gemma 1 2B and 7B) with results similar to the teacher LLMs. We then demonstrate that our technique leads to effective domain generalization, by annotating data in two domains outside the original training data and evaluating on them. Finally, as a key contribution of the paper, we share an easy-to-use API for NLP practitioners to use.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_19803
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scalable and Domain-General Abstractive Proposition Segmentation
Hosseini, Mohammad Javad
Gao, Yang
Baumgärtner, Tim
Fabrikant, Alex
Amplayo, Reinald Kim
Computation and Language
Segmenting text into fine-grained units of meaning is important to a wide range of NLP applications. The default approach of segmenting text into sentences is often insufficient, especially since sentences are usually complex enough to include multiple units of meaning that merit separate treatment in the downstream task. We focus on the task of abstractive proposition segmentation (APS): transforming text into simple, self-contained, well-formed sentences. Several recent works have demonstrated the utility of proposition segmentation with few-shot prompted LLMs for downstream tasks such as retrieval-augmented grounding and fact verification. However, this approach does not scale to large amounts of text and may not always extract all the facts from the input text. In this paper, we first introduce evaluation metrics for the task to measure several dimensions of quality. We then propose a scalable, yet accurate, proposition segmentation model. We model proposition segmentation as a supervised task by training LLMs on existing annotated datasets and show that training yields significantly improved results. We further show that by using the fine-tuned LLMs (Gemini Pro and Gemini Ultra) as teachers for annotating large amounts of multi-domain synthetic distillation data, we can train smaller student models (Gemma 1 2B and 7B) with results similar to the teacher LLMs. We then demonstrate that our technique leads to effective domain generalization, by annotating data in two domains outside the original training data and evaluating on them. Finally, as a key contribution of the paper, we share an easy-to-use API for NLP practitioners to use.
title Scalable and Domain-General Abstractive Proposition Segmentation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19803