A quick guide to Amazon's 40+ papers at EMNLP 2023

Research on natural-language understanding seeks to harness the power of large language models, while query reformulation and text summarization emerge as topics of particular interest.

Natural-language understanding (NLU) has long been a central focus of the papers that Amazon researchers publish at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural-Language Processing (EMNLP), but at this year's conference, which starts today, Amazon's NLU research shows a particular interest in harnessing the power of large language models (LLMs). Question answering also remains an active research topic, while query reformulation and text summarization emerge as new areas of concentration.

Automatic speech recognition

AdaBERT-CTC: Leveraging BERT-CTC for text-only domain adaptation in ASR
Tyler Vuong, Karel Mundnich, Dhanush Bekal, Veera Raghavendra Elluru, Srikanth Ronanki, Sravan Bodapati

Continual learning

Coordinated replay sample selection for continual federated learning
Jack Good, Jimit Majmudar, Christophe Dupuy, Jixuan Wang, Charith Peris, Clement Chung, Richard Zemel, Rahul Gupta 

Data extraction

InsightNet: Structured insight mining from customer feedback
Sandeep Mukku, Manan Soni, Chetan Aggarwal, Jitenkumar Rana, Promod Yenigalla, Rashmi Patange, Shyam Mohan

Knowledge-selective pretraining for attribute value extraction
Hui Liu, Qingyu Yin, Zhengyang Wang, Chenwei Zhang, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Chenwei Zhang, Bing Yin, William Wang, Xiaodan Zhu

Data selection

Influence scores at scale for efficient language data sampling
Nikhil Anand, Joshua Tan, Maria Minakova

Document understanding

A multi-modal multilingual benchmark for document image classification
Yoshinari Fujinuma, Siddharth Varia, Nishant Sankaran, Bonan Min, Srikar Appalaraju, Yogarshi Vyas

Semantic matching for text classification with complex class descriptions
Brian de Silva, Kuan-Wen Huang, Gwang Lee, Karen Hovsepian, Yan Xu, Mingwei Shen

Embodied task completion

Multimodal embodied plan prediction augmented with synthetic embodied dialogue
Aishwarya Padmakumar, Mert Inan, Spandana Gella, Patrick Lange, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

Entity linking

MReFinED: An efficient end-to-end multilingual entity linking system
Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Weiwei Cheng, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Amir Saffari, Jens Lehmann

Few-shot learning

Automated few-shot classification with instruction-finetuned language models
Rami Aly, Xingjian Shi, Kaixiang Lin, Aston Zhang, Andrew Wilson

AuT-Few.png
A schematic view of the Aut-Few prompt automation method. From "Automated few-shot classification with instruction-finetuned language models".

Information retrieval

Deep metric learning to hierarchically rank—An application in product retrieval
Kee Kiat Koo, Ashutosh Joshi, Nishaanth Reddy, Ismail Tutar, Vaclav Petricek, Changhe Yuan, Karim Bouyarmane

KD-Boost: Boosting real-time semantic matching in e-commerce with knowledge distillation
Sanjay Agrawal, Vivek Sembium, Ankith M S

CESAR.png
The CESAR framework automatically merges compound tasks — such as, in this example, keyword-controlled generation and act-grounded generation. From "CESAR: Automatic induction of compositional instructions for multi-turn dialogs".

Multi-teacher distillation for multilingual spelling correction
Jingfen Zhang, Xuan Guo, Sravan Bodapati, Christopher Potts

Instruction tuning

CESAR: Automatic induction of compositional instructions for multi-turn dialogs
Taha Aksu, Devamanyu Hazarika, Shikib Mehri, Seokhwan Kim, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Yang Liu, Mahdi Namazifar

LLM hallucination

INVITE: A testbed of automatically generated invalid questions to evaluate large language models for hallucinations
Anil Ramakrishna, Rahul Gupta, Jens Lehmann, Morteza Ziyadi

Machine learning

Efficient long-range transformers: You need to attend more, but not necessarily at every layer
Qingru Zhang, Dhananjay Ram, Cole Hawkins, Sheng Zha, Tuo Zhao

Natural-language processing

NameGuess: Column name expansion for tabular data
Jiani Zhang, Zhengyuan Shen, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Shen Wang, Huzefa Rangwala, George Karypis

Natural-language understanding

Adversarial robustness for large-language NER models using disentanglement and word attributions
Xiaomeng Jin, Bhanu Vinzamuri, Sriram Venkatapathy, Heng Ji, Pradeep Natarajan

Measuring and mitigating dialog-to-API constraint violations of in-context learning
Shufan Wang, Sebastien Jean, Sailik Sengupta, James Gung, Nikolaos Pappas, Yi Zhang

Intent classification.png
Overview of the pretraining of an intent-aware encoder. Given an utterance, x1, from the pretraining corpus, Amazon researchers generate a pseudo intent name, y1pseudo, using labels from the intent-role-labeling (IRL) tagger. The model is then optimized by pulling the gold utterance x1gold, the gold intent y1, and the pseudo intent, y1pseudo, close to the input utterance, x1, in the embedding space. From "Pre-training intent-aware encoders for zero- and few-shot intent classification".

MultiCoNER v2: A large multilingual dataset for fine-grained and noisy named entity recognition
Besnik Fetahu, Zhiyu Chen, Sudipta Kar, Oleg Rokhlenko, Shervin Malmasi

Pre-training intent-aware encoders for zero- and few-shot intent classification
Mujeen Sung, James Gung, Elman Mansimov, Nikolaos Pappas, Raphael Shu, Salvatore Romeo, Yi Zhang, Vittorio Castelli

Personalization

Personalized dense retrieval on global index for voice-enabled conversational systems
Masha Belyi, Charlotte Dzialo, Chaitanya Dwivedi, Prajit Reddy Muppidi, Kanna Shimizu

Retrieve and copy: Scaling ASR personalization to large catalogs
Sai Muralidhar Jayanthi, Devang Kulshreshtha, Saket Dingliwal, Srikanth Ronanki, Sravan Bodapati

Query reformulation

CL-QR: Cross-lingual enhanced query reformulation for multi-lingual conversational AI agents
Zhongkai Sun, Zhengyang Zhao, Sixing Lu, Chengyuan Ma, Xiaohu Liu, Xing Fan, Wei (Sawyer) Shen, Chenlei (Edward) Guo

Graph meets LLM: A novel approach to collaborative filtering for robust conversational understanding
Zheng Chen, Ziyan Jiang, Fan Yang, Eunah Cho, Xing Fan, Xiaojiang Huang, Yanbin Lu, Aram Galstyan

Improving contextual query rewrite for conversational AI agents through user-preference feedback learning
Zhongkai Sun, Yingxue Zhou, Jie Hao, Xing Fan, Yanbin Lu, Chengyuan Ma, Wei (Sawyer) Shen, Chenlei (Edward) Guo

Question-answer databases

Protege: Prompt-based diverse question generation from web articles
Vinayak Puranik, Anirban Majumder, Vineet Chaoji

QUADRo: Dataset and models for question-answer database retrieval
Stefano Campese, Ivano Lauriola, Alessandro Moschitti

Question answering

Strong and efficient baselines for open domain conversational question answering
Andrei C. Coman, Gianni Barlacchi, Adrià de Gispert

Tokenization consistency matters for generative models on extractive NLP tasks
Kaiser Sun, Peng Qi, Yuhao Zhang, Lan Liu, William Yang Wang, Zhiheng Huang

Too much of product information: Don’t worry, let’s look for evidence!
Aryan Jain, Jitenkumar Rana, Chetan Aggarwal

Reasoning

Plan, verify and switch: Integrated reasoning with diverse x-of-thoughts
Tengxiao Liu, Qipeng Guo, Yuqing Yang, Xiangkun Hu, Yue Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Zheng Zhang 

XOT.png
An overview of the x-of-thought (XoT) problem-solving framework, which integrates chain-of-thought (CoT) and program-of-thought (PoT) methods with the researchers' novel equation-of-thought (EoT) approach. From "Plan, verify and switch: Integrated reasoning with diverse x-of-thoughts".

Responsible AI

Geographical erasure in language generation
Pola Schwöbel, Jacek Golebiowski, Michele Donini, Cédric Archambeau, Danish Pruthi

Speech translation

End-to-end single-channel speaker-turn aware conversational speech translation
Juan Pablo Zuluaga Gomez, Zhaocheng Huang, Xing Niu, Rohit Paturi, Sundararajan Srinivasan, Prashant Mathur, Brian Thompson, Marcello Federico

Text summarization

Enhancing abstractiveness of summarization models through calibrated distillation
Hwanjun Song, Igor Shalyminov, Hang Su, Siffi Singh, Kaisheng Yao, Saab Mansour

Generating summaries with controllable readability levels
Leonardo Ribeiro, Mohit Bansal, Markus Dreyer

Improving consistency for text summarization with energy functions
Qi Zeng, Qingyu Yin, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Sreyashi Nag, Zhengyang Wang, Bing Yin, Heng Ji, Chao Zhang

InstructPTS: Instruction-tuning LLMs for product title summarization
Besnik Fetahu, Zhiyu Chen, Oleg Rokhlenko, Shervin Malmasi

Multi document summarization evaluation in the presence of damaging content
Avshalom Manevich, David Carmel, Nachshon Cohen, Elad Kravi, Ori Shapira

Re-examining summarization evaluation across multiple quality criteria
Ori Ernst, Ori Shapira, Ido Dagan, Ran Levy

Topic modeling

DeTiME: Diffusion-enhanced topic modeling using encoder-decoder based LLM
Weijie Xu, Wenxiang Hu, Fanyou Wu, Srinivasan Sengamedu, "SHS"

Research areas

Related content

CA, ON, Toronto
Are you motivated to explore research in ambiguous spaces? Are you interested in conducting research that will improve associate, employee and manager experiences at Amazon? Do you want to work on an interdisciplinary team of scientists that collaborate rather than compete? Join us at PXT Central Science! The People eXperience and Technology Central Science Team (PXTCS) uses economics, behavioral science, statistics, and machine learning to proactively identify mechanisms and process improvements which simultaneously improve Amazon and the lives, wellbeing, and the value of work to Amazonians. We are an interdisciplinary team that combines the talents of science and engineering to develop and deliver solutions that measurably achieve this goal. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist for People Experience and Technology (PXT) Central Science, you will be working with our science and engineering teams, specifically on re-imagining Generative AI Applications and Generative AI Infrastructure for HR. Applying Generative AI to HR has unique challenges such as privacy, fairness, and seamlessly integrating Enterprise Knowledge and World Knowledge and knowing which to use when. In addition, the team works on some of Amazon’s most strategic technical investments in the people space and support Amazon’s efforts to be Earth’s Best Employer. In this role you will have a significant impact on 1.5 million Amazonians and the communities Amazon serves and ample scope to demonstrate scientific thought leadership and scientific impact in addition to business impact. You will also play a critical role in the organization's business planning, work closely with senior leaders to develop goals and resource requirements, influence our long-term technical and business strategy, and help hire and develop science and engineering talent. You will also provide support to business partners, helping them use the best scientific methods and science-driven tools to solve current and upcoming challenges and deliver efficiency gains in a changing marke About the team The AI/ML team in PXTCS is working on building Generative AI solutions to reimagine Corp employee and Ops associate experience. Examples of state-of-the-art solutions are Coaching for Amazon employees (available on AZA) and reinventing Employee Recruiting and Employee Listening.
CA, ON, Toronto
Conversational AI ModEling and Learning (CAMEL) team is part of Amazon Devices organization where our mission is to build a best-in-class Conversational AI that is intuitive, intelligent, and responsive, by developing superior Large Language Models (LLM) solutions and services which increase the capabilities built into the model and which enable utilizing thousands of APIs and external knowledge sources to provide the best experience for each request across millions of customers and endpoints. We are looking for a passionate, talented, and resourceful Applied Scientist in the field of LLM, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Recommender Systems and/or Information Retrieval, to invent and build scalable solutions for a state-of-the-art context-aware conversational AI. A successful candidate will have strong machine learning background and a desire to push the envelope in one or more of the above areas. The ideal candidate would also have hands-on experiences in building Generative AI solutions with LLMs, enjoy operating in dynamic environments, be self-motivated to take on challenging problems to deliver big customer impact, moving fast to ship solutions and then iterating on user feedback and interactions. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist, you will leverage your technical expertise and experience to collaborate with other talented applied scientists and engineers to research and develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to reduce friction and enable natural and contextual conversations. You will analyze, understand and improve user experiences by leveraging Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in artificial intelligence. You will work on core LLM technologies, including Prompt Engineering and Optimization, Supervised Fine-Tuning, Learning from Human Feedback, Evaluation, Self-Learning, etc. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of novel products and services.
CA, ON, Toronto
Conversational AI ModEling and Learning (CAMEL) team is part of Amazon Devices organization where our mission is to build a best-in-class Conversational AI that is intuitive, intelligent, and responsive, by developing superior Large Language Models (LLM) solutions and services which increase the capabilities built into the model and which enable utilizing thousands of APIs and external knowledge sources to provide the best experience for each request across millions of customers and endpoints. We are looking for a passionate, talented, and resourceful Applied Scientist in the field of LLM, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Recommender Systems and/or Information Retrieval, to invent and build scalable solutions for a state-of-the-art context-aware conversational AI. A successful candidate will have strong machine learning background and a desire to push the envelope in one or more of the above areas. The ideal candidate would also have hands-on experiences in building Generative AI solutions with LLMs, enjoy operating in dynamic environments, be self-motivated to take on challenging problems to deliver big customer impact, moving fast to ship solutions and then iterating on user feedback and interactions. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist, you will leverage your technical expertise and experience to collaborate with other talented applied scientists and engineers to research and develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to reduce friction and enable natural and contextual conversations. You will analyze, understand and improve user experiences by leveraging Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in artificial intelligence. You will work on core LLM technologies, including Prompt Engineering and Optimization, Supervised Fine-Tuning, Learning from Human Feedback, Evaluation, Self-Learning, etc. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of novel products and services.
US, CA, San Diego
Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists who use machine learning and statistical techniques to help Amazon provide the best customer experience by preventing eCommerce fraud? Are you excited by the prospect of analyzing and modeling terabytes of data and creating state-of-the-art algorithms to solve real world problems? Do you like to own end-to-end business problems/metrics and directly impact the profitability of the company? Do you enjoy collaborating in a diverse team environment? If yes, then you may be a great fit to join the Amazon Buyer Risk Prevention (BRP) Machine Learning group. We are looking for a talented scientist who is passionate to build advanced algorithmic systems that help manage safety of millions of transactions every day. Key job responsibilities Use machine learning and statistical techniques to create scalable risk management systems Learning and understanding large amounts of Amazon’s historical business data for specific instances of risk or broader risk trends Design, development and evaluation of highly innovative models for risk management Working closely with software engineering teams to drive real-time model implementations and new feature creations Working closely with operations staff to optimize risk management operations, Establishing scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation Tracking general business activity and providing clear, compelling management reporting on a regular basis Research and implement novel machine learning and statistical approaches
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to build industry-leading Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As a Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will work with talented peers to lead the development of novel algorithms and modeling techniques, to advance the state of the art with LLMs. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in spoken language understanding. About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in GenAI with LLMs and multimodal systems, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
US, WA, Seattle
The XCM (Cross Channel Cross-Category Marketing) team seeks an Applied Scientist to revolutionize our marketing strategies. XCM's mission is to build the most measurably effective, creatively impactful, and cross-channel campaigning capabilities possible, with the aim of growing "big-bet" programs, strengthening positive brand perceptions, and increasing long-term free cash flow. As a science team, we're tackling complex challenges in marketing incrementality measurement, optimization and audience segmentation. In this role, you'll collaborate with a diverse team of scientists and economists to build and enhance causal measurement, optimization and prediction models for Amazon's global multi-billion dollar fixed marketing budget. You'll also work closely with various teams to develop scientific roadmaps, drive innovation, and influence key resource allocation decisions. Key job responsibilities 1) Innovating scalable marketing methodologies using causal inference and machine learning. 2) Developing interpretable models that provide actionable business insights. 3) Collaborating with engineers to automate and scale scientific solutions. 4) Engaging with stakeholders to ensure effective adoption of scientific products. 5) Presenting findings to the Amazon Science community to promote excellence and knowledge-sharing.
US, WA, Seattle
Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists who use machine learning and statistical techniques to help Amazon provide the best customer experience by preventing eCommerce fraud? Are you excited by the prospect of analyzing and modeling terabytes of data and creating state-of-the-art algorithms to solve real world problems? Do you like to own end-to-end business problems/metrics and directly impact the profitability of the company? Do you enjoy collaborating in a diverse team environment? If yes, then you may be a great fit to join the Amazon Buyer Risk Prevention (BRP) Machine Learning group. We are looking for a talented scientist who is passionate to build advanced algorithmic systems that help manage safety of millions of transactions every day. Key job responsibilities Use machine learning and statistical techniques to create scalable risk management systems Learning and understanding large amounts of Amazon’s historical business data for specific instances of risk or broader risk trends Design, development and evaluation of highly innovative models for risk management Working closely with software engineering teams to drive real-time model implementations and new feature creations Working closely with operations staff to optimize risk management operations, Establishing scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation Tracking general business activity and providing clear, compelling management reporting on a regular basis Research and implement novel machine learning and statistical approaches
US, WA, Seattle
The Global Cross-Channel and Cross- Category Marketing (XCM) org are seeking an experienced Economist to join our team. XCM’s mission is to be the most measurably effective and creatively breakthrough marketing organization in the world in order to strengthen the brand, grow the business, and reduce cost for Amazon overall. We achieve this through scaled campaigning in support of brands, categories, and audiences which aim to create the maximum incremental impact for Amazon as a whole by driving the Amazon flywheel. This is a high impact role with the opportunities to lead the development of state-of-the-art, scalable models to measure the efficacy and effectiveness of a new marketing channel. In this critical role, you will leverage your deep expertise in causal inference to design and implement robust measurement frameworks that provide actionable insights to drive strategic business decisions. Key Responsibilities: Develop advanced econometric and statistical models to rigorously evaluate the causal incremental impact of marketing campaigns on customer perception and customer behaviors. Collaborate cross-functionally with marketing, product, data science and engineering teams to define the measurement strategy and ensure alignment on objectives. Leverage large, complex datasets to uncover hidden patterns and trends, extracting meaningful insights that inform marketing optimization and investment decisions. Work with engineers, applied scientists and product managers to automate the model in production environment. Stay up-to-date with the latest research and methodological advancements in causal inference, causal ML and experiment design to continuously enhance the team's capabilities. Effectively communicate analysis findings, recommendations, and their business implications to key stakeholders, including senior leadership. Mentor and guide junior economists, fostering a culture of analytical excellence and innovation.
US, WA, Seattle
We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations: Seattle, WA, USA Do you love using data to solve complex problems? Are you interested in innovating and developing world-class big data solutions? We have the career for you! EPP Analytics team is seeking an exceptional Data Scientist to recommend, design and deliver new advanced analytics and science innovations end-to-end partnering closely with our security/software engineers, and response investigators. Your work enables faster data-driven decision making for Preventive and Response teams by providing them with data management tools, actionable insights, and an easy-to-use reporting experience. The ideal candidate will be passionate about working with big data sets and have the expertise to utilize these data sets to derive insights, drive science roadmap and foster growth. Key job responsibilities - As a Data Scientist (DS) in EPP Analytics, you will do causal data science, build predictive models, conduct simulations, create visualizations, and influence data science practice across the organization. - Provide insights by analyzing historical data - Create experiments and prototype implementations of new learning algorithms and prediction techniques. - Research and build machine learning algorithms that improve Insider Threat risk A day in the life No two days are the same in Insider Risk teams - the nature of the work we do and constantly shifting threat landscape means sometimes you'll be working with an internal service team to find anomalous use of their data, other days you'll be working with IT teams to build improved controls. Some days you'll be busy writing detections, or mentoring or running design review meetings. The EPP Analytics team is made up of SDEs and Security Engineers who partner with Data Scientists to create big data solutions and continue to raise the bar for the EPP organization. As a member of the team you will have the opportunity to work on challenging data modeling solutions, new and innovative Quicksight based reporting, and data pipeline and process improvement projects. About the team Diverse Experiences Amazon Security values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Why Amazon Security? At Amazon, security is central to maintaining customer trust and delivering delightful customer experiences. Our organization is responsible for creating and maintaining a high bar for security across all of Amazon’s products and services. We offer talented security professionals the chance to accelerate their careers with opportunities to build experience in a wide variety of areas including cloud, devices, retail, entertainment, healthcare, operations, and physical stores Inclusive Team Culture In Amazon Security, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Ongoing DEI events and learning experiences inspire us to continue learning and to embrace our uniqueness. Addressing the toughest security challenges requires that we seek out and celebrate a diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices. Training & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, training, and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why flexible work hours and arrangements are part of our culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists who use machine learning and statistical techniques to create state-of-the-art solutions for providing better value to Amazon’s customers? Do you want to build and deploy advanced algorithmic systems that help optimize millions of transactions every day? Are you excited by the prospect of analyzing and modeling terabytes of data to solve real world problems? Do you like to own end-to-end business problems/metrics and directly impact the profitability of the company? Do you like to innovate and simplify? If yes, then you may be a great fit to join the Machine Learning and Data Sciences team for India Consumer Businesses. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, know how to deliver, love to work with data, are deeply technical, highly innovative and long for the opportunity to build solutions to challenging problems that directly impact the company's bottom-line, we want to talk to you. Major responsibilities - Use machine learning and analytical techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems - Analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of Amazon’s historical business data to help automate and optimize key processes - Design, development, evaluate and deploy innovative and highly scalable models for predictive learning - Research and implement novel machine learning and statistical approaches - Work closely with software engineering teams to drive real-time model implementations and new feature creations - Work closely with business owners and operations staff to optimize various business operations - Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation - Mentor other scientists and engineers in the use of ML techniques