Recurrent Alignment with Hard Attention for Hierarchical Text Rating

While large language models (LLMs) excel at understanding and generating plain text, they are not tailored to handle hierarchical text structures or directly predict task-specific properties such as text rating. In fact, selectively and repeatedly grasping the hierarchical structure of large-scale text is pivotal for deciphering its essence. To this end, we propose a novel framework for hierarchical text rating utilizing LLMs, which incorporates Recurrent Alignment with Hard Attention (RAHA). Particularly, hard attention mechanism prompts a frozen LLM to selectively focus on pertinent leaf texts associated with the root text and generate symbolic representations of their relationships. Inspired by the gradual stabilization of the Markov Chain, recurrent alignment strategy involves feeding predicted ratings iteratively back into the prompts of another trainable LLM, aligning it to progressively approximate the desired target. Experimental results demonstrate that RAHA outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on three hierarchical text rating datasets. Theoretical and empirical analysis confirms RAHA's ability to gradually converge towards the underlying target through multiple inferences. Additional experiments on plain text rating datasets verify the effectiveness of this Markov-like alignment. Our data and code can be available in https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/Markov-LLM.