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Instruction-following language models often show undesirable biases. These undesirable biases may be accelerated in the real-world usage of language models, where a wide range of instructions is used through zero-shot example prompting. To solve this problem, we first define the bias neuron, which significantly affects biased outputs, and prove its existence empirically. Furthermore, we propose a novel and practical bias mitigation method, CRISPR, to eliminate bias neurons of language models in instruction-following settings. CRISPR automatically determines biased outputs and categorizes neurons that affect the biased outputs as bias neurons using an explainability method. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in mitigating biases under zero-shot instruction-following settings without losing the model&#39;s task performance and existing knowledge. The experimental results reveal the generalizability of our method as it shows robustness under various instructions and datasets. Surprisingly, our method can mitigate the bias in language models by eliminating only a few neurons (at least three).

ACL 2024

Mitigating Biases for Instruction-following Language Models via Bias Neurons Elimination

bias neuron

instruction bias

calibration

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Instruction-following language models often show undesirable biases. These undesirable biases may be accelerated in the real-world usage of language models, where a wide range of instructions is used through zero-shot example prompting. To solve this problem, we first define the bias neuron, which significantly affects biased outputs, and prove its existence empirically. Furthermore, we propose a novel and practical bias mitigation method, CRISPR, to eliminate bias neurons of language models in instruction-following settings. CRISPR automatically determines biased outputs and categorizes neurons that affect the biased outputs as bias neurons using an explainability method. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in mitigating biases under zero-shot instruction-following settings without losing the model's task performance and existing knowledge. The experimental results reveal the generalizability of our method as it shows robustness under various instructions and datasets. Surprisingly, our method can mitigate the bias in language models by eliminating only a few neurons (at least three).

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Spoken language glossification (SLG) aims to translate the spoken language text into the sign language gloss, i.e., a written record of sign language. In this work, we present a framework named $S$emi-$S$upervised $S$poken $L$anguage $G$lossification ($S^3$LG) for SLG. To tackle the bottleneck of limited parallel data in SLG, our $S^3$LG incorporates large-scale monolingual spoken language text into SLG training. The proposed framework follows the self-training structure that iteratively annotates and learns from pseudo labels. Considering the lexical similarity and syntactic difference between sign language and spoken language, our $S^3$LG adopts both the rule-based heuristic and model-based approach for auto-annotation. During training, we randomly mix these complementary synthetic datasets and mark their differences with a special token. As the synthetic data may be less quality, the $S^3$LG further leverages consistency regularization to reduce the negative impact of noise in the synthetic data. Extensive experiments are conducted on public benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the $S^3$LG. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/yaohj11/S3LG}.

Semi-Supervised Spoken Language Glossification

There is a growing body of work on learning from human feedback to align various aspects of machine learning systems with human values and preferences. We consider the setting of fairness in content moderation, in which human feedback is used to determine how two comments --- referencing different sensitive attribute groups --- should be treated in comparison to one another. With a novel dataset collected from Prolific and MTurk, we find significant gaps in fairness preferences depending on the race, age, political stance, educational level, and LGBTQ+ identity of annotators. We also demonstrate that demographics mentioned in text have a strong influence on how users perceive individual fairness in moderation. Further, we find that differences also exist in downstream classifiers trained to predict human preferences. Finally, we observe that an ensemble, giving equal weight to classifiers trained on annotations from different demographics, performs better for different demographic intersections; compared to a single classifier that gives equal weight to each annotation.

Whose Preferences? Differences in Fairness Preferences and Their Impact on the Fairness of AI Utilizing Human Feedback

In this paper, we uncover a positional bias in the evaluation paradigm of adopting large language models~(LLMs), e.g., GPT-4, as a referee to score and compare the quality of responses generated by candidate models. We find that the quality ranking of candidate responses can be easily hacked by simply altering their order of appearance in the context. This manipulation allows us to skew the evaluation result, making one model appear considerably superior to the other, e.g., Vicuna-13B could beat ChatGPT on 66 over 80 tested queries with ChatGPT as an evaluator. We propose a simple yet effective calibration framework to address our discovered positional bias.
To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we manually annotate the ``win/tie/lose'' outcomes of responses from ChatGPT and Vicuna-13B in the Vicuna Benchmark's question prompt. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach successfully alleviates evaluation bias, resulting in closer alignment with human judgments.

Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators

We analysed a sample of NLP research papers archived in ACL Anthology as an attempt to quantify the degree of openness and the benefit of such an open culture in the NLP community. We observe that papers published in different NLP venues show different patterns related to artefact reuse. We also note that more than 30% of the papers we analysed do not release their artefacts publicly. Further, we observe a wide language-wise disparity in publicly available NLP-related artefacts.

Shoulders of Giants: A Look at the Degree and Utility of Openness in NLP Research

We present the Legal Passage Retrieval Dataset, LePaRD. LePaRD contains millions of examples of U.S. federal judges citing precedent in context. The dataset aims to facilitate work on legal passage retrieval, a challenging practice-oriented legal retrieval and reasoning task. Legal passage retrieval seeks to predict relevant passages from precedential court decisions given the context of a legal argument. We extensively evaluate various approaches on LePaRD, and find that classification-based retrieval appears to work best. Our best models only achieve a recall of 59% when trained on data corresponding to the 10,000 most-cited passages, underscoring the difficulty of legal passage retrieval. By publishing LePaRD, we provide a large-scale and high quality resource to foster further research on legal passage retrieval. We hope that research on this practice-oriented NLP task will help expand access to justice by reducing the burden associated with legal research via computational assistance. Warning: Extracts from judicial opinions may contain offensive language.

LePaRD: A Large-Scale Dataset of Judicial Citations to Precedent

Intuitively, reasoning abilities are considered language-agnostic. However, existing LLMs exhibit inconsistent reasoning abilities across different languages, e.g., reasoning in the dominant language like English is superior to other languages due to the imbalance of multilingual training data. To enhance reasoning abilities in non-dominant languages, we propose a Multilingual-Alignment-as-Preference Optimization framework (MAPO) to align the reasoning processes in other languages with the dominant language. Specifically, we harness an off-the-shelf translation model for the consistency between answers in non-dominant and dominant languages, which we adopt as the preference for optimization, e.g., Direct Preference Optimization(DPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Experiments show that MAPO stably achieves significant improvements in the multilingual reasoning of various models on all three benchmarks (MSVAMP +16.2%, MGSM +6.1%, and MNumGLUESub +13.3%), with improved reasoning consistency across languages. The project is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/MAPO.

MAPO: Advancing Multilingual Reasoning through Multilingual-Alignment-as-Preference Optimization

Structured Sentiment Analysis (SSA) was cast as a problem of bi-lexical dependency graph parsing by prior studies.
Multiple formulations have been proposed to construct the graph, which share several intrinsic drawbacks:
(1) The internal structures of spans are neglected, thus only the boundary tokens of spans are used for relation prediction and span recognition, thus hindering the model's expressiveness;
(2) Long spans occupy a significant proportion in the SSA datasets, which further exacerbates the problem of internal structure neglect.
In this paper, we treat the SSA task as a dependency parsing task on partially-observed dependency trees, regarding flat spans without determined tree annotations as latent subtrees to consider internal structures of spans.
We propose a two-stage parsing method and leverage TreeCRFs with a novel constrained inside algorithm to model latent structures explicitly, which also takes advantages of joint scoring graph arcs and headed spans for global optimization and inference. 
Results of extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets reveal that our method performs significantly better than all previous bi-lexical methods, achieving new state-of-the-art.

Revisiting Structured Sentiment Analysis as Latent Dependency Graph Parsing

To better analyze informal arguments on public forums, we propose the task of argument explication, which makes explicit a text's argumentative structure and implicit reasoning by outputting triples of propositions ⟨claim, reason warrant⟩. The three slots, or argument components, are derived from the widely known Toulmin (1958) model of argumentation. While prior research applies Toulmin or related theories to annotate datasets and train supervised models, we develop an effective method to prompt generative large language models (LMs) to output explicitly named argument components proposed by Toulmin by prompting with the theory name (e.g., `According to Toulmin model'). We evaluate the outputs' coverage and validity through a human study and automatic evaluation based on prior argumentation datasets and perform robustness checks over alternative LMs, prompts, and argumentation theories. Finally, we conduct a proof-of-concept case study to extract an interpretable argumentation (hyper)graph from a large corpus of critical public comments on whether to allow the COVID-19 vaccine for children, suggesting future directions for corpus analysis and argument visualization.

Harnessing Toulmin's theory for zero-shot argument explication

Legal tasks and datasets are often used as benchmarks for the capabilities of language models. However, openly available annotated datasets are rare. In this paper, we introduce AGB-DE, a corpus of 3,764 clauses from German consumer contracts that have been annotated and legally assessed by legal experts. Together with the data, we present a first baseline for the task of detecting potentially void clauses, comparing the performance of an SVM baseline with three fine-tuned open language models and the performance of GPT-3.5. Our results show the challenging nature of the task, with no approach exceeding an F1-score of 0.54. While the fine-tuned models often performed better with regard to precision, GPT-3.5 outperformed the other approaches with regard to recall. An analysis of the errors indicates that one of the main challenges could be the correct interpretation of complex clauses, rather than the decision boundaries of what is permissible and what is not.

AGB-DE: A Corpus for the Automated Legal Assessment of Clauses in German Consumer Contracts

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a main technique for alleviating hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). 
Despite the integration of RAG, LLMs may still present unsupported or contradictory claims to the retrieved contents. 
In order to develop effective hallucination prevention strategies under RAG, it is important to create benchmark datasets that can measure the extent of hallucination. 
This paper presents RAGTruth, a corpus tailored for analyzing word-level hallucinations in various domains and tasks within the standard RAG frameworks for LLM applications. 
RAGTruth comprises nearly 18,000 naturally generated responses from diverse LLMs using RAG. 
These responses have undergone meticulous manual annotations at both the individual case and word levels, incorporating evaluations of hallucination intensity. 
We not only benchmark hallucination frequencies across different LLMs, but also critically assess the effectiveness of several existing hallucination detection methodologies. 
We show that using a high-quality dataset such as RAGTruth, it is possible to finetune a relatively small LLM and achieve a competitive hallucination detection performance when compared to the existing prompt-based approaches using state-of-the-art LLMs such as GPT-4. Furthermore, the finetuned model can effectively mitigate hallucination in LLM responses.

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Semi-Supervised Spoken Language Glossification

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