Thailand

Concept embeddings offer a practical and efficient mechanism for injecting commonsense knowledge into downstream tasks. Their core purpose is often not to predict the commonsense properties of concepts themselves, but rather to identify commonalities, i.e. sets of concepts which share some property of interest. Such commonalities are the basis for inductive generalisation, hence high-quality concept embeddings can make learning easier and more robust. Unfortunately, standard embeddings primarily reflect basic taxonomic categories, making them unsuitable for finding commonalities that refer to more specific aspects (e.g. the colour of objects or the materials they are made of). In this paper, we address this limitation by explicitly modelling the different facets of interest when learning concept embeddings. We show that this leads to embeddings which capture a more diverse range of commonsense properties, and consistently improves results in downstream tasks such as ultra-fine entity typing and ontology completion.

ACL 2024

Modelling Commonsense Commonalities with Multi-Facet Concept Embeddings

commonality detection

conceptual spaces

concept embeddings

representation learning

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

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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Please register!

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.

We introduce SPAGHETTI: Semantic Parsing Augmented Generation for Hybrid English information from Text Tables and Infoboxes, a hybrid question-answering (QA) pipeline that utilizes information from heterogeneous knowledge sources, including knowledge base, text, tables, and infoboxes. Our LLM-augmented approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Compmix dataset, the most comprehensive heterogeneous open-domain QA dataset, with 56.5% exact match (EM) rate. More importantly, manual analysis on a sample of the dataset suggests that SPAGHETTI is more than 90% accurate, indicating that EM is no longer suitable for assessing the capabilities of QA systems today.

SPAGHETTI: Open-Domain Question Answering from Heterogeneous Data Sources with Retrieval and Semantic Parsing

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), like BERT, with self-supervision objectives exhibit remarkable performance and generalization across various tasks. However, they suffer in inference latency due to their large size. To address this issue, side branches are attached at intermediate layers, enabling early inference of samples without requiring them to pass through all layers. However, the challenge is to decide which layer to infer and exit each sample so that the accuracy and latency are balanced. Moreover, the distribution of the samples to be inferred may differ from that used for training necessitating cross-domain adaptation. We propose an online learning algorithm named Cross-Domain Inference in Early Exit BERT (CeeBERT) that dynamically determines early exits of samples based on the level of confidence at each exit point. CeeBERT learns optimal thresholds from domain-specific confidence observed at intermediate layers on the fly, eliminating the need for labeled data. Experimental results on five distinct datasets with BERT and ALBERT models demonstrate CeeBERT's ability to improve latency by reducing unnecessary computations with minimal drop in performance. By adapting to the threshold values, CeeBERT can speed up the BERT/ALBERT models by $2\times$ - $3.1\times$ with minimal drop in accuracy. The anonymized source code is available at https://github.com/Div290/CeeBERT.

CeeBERT: Cross-Domain Inference in Early Exit BERT

A summary structure is inherent to certain types of texts according to the Genre Theory of Linguistics. Such structures aid readers in efficiently locating information within summaries. However, most existing automatic summarization methods overlook the importance of summary structure, resulting in summaries that emphasize the most prominent information while omitting essential details from other sections. While a few summarizers recognize the importance of summary structure, they rely heavily on the predefined labels of summary structures in the source document and ground truth summaries. To address these shortcomings, we developed a Structured Knowledge-Guided Summarization (SKGSum) and its variant, SKGSum-W, which do not require structure labels. Instead, these methods rely on a set of automatically extracted summary points to generate summaries. We evaluate the proposed methods using three real-world datasets. The results indicate that our methods not only improve the quality of summaries, in terms of ROUGE and BERTScore, but also broaden the types of documents that can be effectively summarized.

SKGSum: Structured Knowledge-Guided Document Summarization

Document-level event extraction aims to extract structured event information from unstructured text. However, a single document often contains limited event information and the roles of different event arguments may be biased due to the influence of the information source.
This paper addresses the limitations of traditional document-level event extraction by proposing the task of cross-document event extraction (CDEE) to integrate event information from multiple documents and provide a comprehensive perspective on events. We construct a novel cross-document event extraction dataset, namely CLES, which contains 20,059 documents and 37,688 mention-level events, where over 70\% of them are cross-document. To address the task, we propose a CDEE pipeline that includes 5 steps, namely event extraction, coreference resolution, entity normalization, role normalization and entity-role resolution. Our CDEE pipeline achieves about 72\% F1 in end-to-end cross-document event extraction, suggesting the challenge of this task and setting up a benchmark for future research. Our work builds a new line of information extraction research and will attract new research attention.

Harvesting Events from Multiple Sources: Towards a Cross-Document Event Extraction Paradigm

Reasoning about subjective natural language descriptions, such as opinions and preferences, is a challenging topic that largely remains unsolved to date. In particular, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) perform disappointingly in this task, show strong biases, and do not meet the interpretability requirements often needed in these kinds of applications. We propose a novel approach for reasoning about subjective knowledge that integrates potential and implicit meanings and explicitly models the relational nature of the information. We apply supervised graph learning, offer explanations for the model's reasoning, and show that our model performs well across all 15 topics of OpinionQA, outperforming several prominent LLMs. Our detailed analysis further shows its unique advantages and the complementary nature it offers in comparison to LLMs.

A Graph per Persona: Reasoning about Subjective Natural Language Descriptions

With the remarkable capabilities, large language models (LLMs) have emerged
as essential elements in numerous NLP applications, while parameter-efficient
finetuning, especially LoRA, has gained popularity as a lightweight approach
for model customization. Meanwhile, various dropout methods, initially designed
for full finetuning with all the parameters updated, alleviates overfitting
associated with excessive parameter redundancy. Hence, a possible contradiction
arises from negligible trainable parameters of LoRA and the effectiveness of
previous dropout methods, which has been largely overlooked. To fill this gap,
we first confirm that parameter-efficient LoRA is also overfitting-prone. We
then revisit transformer-specific dropout methods, and establish their
equivalence and distinctions mathematically and empirically. Building upon this
comparative analysis, we introduce a unified framework for a comprehensive
investigation, which instantiates these methods based on dropping position,
structural pattern and compensation measure. Through this framework, we reveal
the new preferences and performance comparisons of them when involved with
limited trainable parameters. This framework also allows us to amalgamate the
most favorable aspects into a novel dropout method named HiddenKey. Extensive
experiments verify the remarkable superiority and sufficiency of HiddenKey
across multiple models and tasks, which highlights it as the preferred approach
for high-performance and parameter-efficient finetuning of LLMs.

LoRA Meets Dropout under a Unified Framework

Large language models often necessitate grounding on external knowledge to generate faithful and reliable answers. Yet even with the correct groundings in the reference, they can ignore them and rely on wrong groundings or their inherent biases to hallucinate when users, being largely unaware of the specifics of the stored information, pose questions that might not directly correlate with the retrieved groundings. In this work, we formulate this knowledge alignment problem and introduce MixAlign, a framework that interacts with both the human user and the knowledge base to obtain and integrate clarifications on how the user question relates to the stored information. MixAlign employs a language model to achieve automatic knowledge alignment and, if necessary, further enhances this alignment through human user clarifications. Experimental results highlight the crucial role of knowledge alignment in boosting model performance and mitigating hallucination, with improvements noted up to 22.2% and 27.1% respectively. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of MixAlign in improving knowledge alignment by producing high-quality, user-centered clarifications.

The Knowledge Alignment Problem: Bridging Human and External Knowledge for Large Language Models

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to answer natural language questions over large-scale knowledge bases (KBs), which can be summarized into two crucial steps: knowledge retrieval and semantic parsing. However, three core challenges remain: inefficient knowledge retrieval, mistakes of retrieval adversely impacting semantic parsing, and the complexity of previous KBQA methods. To tackle these challenges, we introduce ChatKBQA, a novel and simple generate-then-retrieve KBQA framework, which proposes first generating the logical form with fine-tuned LLMs, then retrieving and replacing entities and relations with an unsupervised retrieval method, to improve both generation and retrieval more directly. Experimental results show that ChatKBQA achieves new state-of-the-art performance on standard KBQA datasets, WebQSP, and CWQ. This work can also be regarded as a new paradigm for combining LLMs with knowledge graphs (KGs) for interpretable and knowledge-required question answering.

ChatKBQA: A Generate-then-Retrieve Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering with Fine-tuned Large Language Models

The growth of social media, characterized by its multimodal nature, has led to the emergence of diverse phenomena and challenges, which calls for an effective approach to uniformly solve automated tasks. The powerful Large Vision Language Models make it possible to handle a variety of tasks simultaneously, but even with carefully designed prompting methods, the general domain models often fall short in aligning with the unique speaking style and context of social media tasks. In this paper, we introduce a Large Vision Language Model for Social Media Processing (SoMeLVLM), which is a cognitive framework equipped with five key capabilities including knowledge & comprehension, application, analysis, evaluation, and creation. SoMeLVLM is designed to understand and generate realistic social media behavior. We have developed a 654k multimodal social media instruction-tuning dataset to support our cognitive framework and fine-tune our model. Our experiments demonstrate that SoMeLVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple social media tasks. Further analysis shows its significant advantages over baselines in terms of cognitive abilities.

SoMeLVLM: A Large Vision Language Model for Social Media Processing

The evolution of large language models (LLMs) has culminated in a multitask model paradigm where prompts drive the generation of user-specific outputs. However, this advancement has revealed a critical challenge: LLMs frequently produce outputs against socially acceptable commonsense standards in various scenarios. To address this gap in commonsense reasoning, we present KoCommonGEN v2, a fine-grained benchmark dataset focused on Korean commonsense reasoning. This dataset, enriched with human annotations, comprises multiple-choice questions across seven error categories. These categories include commonsense memorization, numerical commonsense, toxic speech, and more, which are vulnerable to undermining the reliability of LLMs' commonsense reasoning capabilities. The empirical results present that LLMs struggle with Korean commonsense reasoning. With human accuracy benchmarked at approximately 85%, GPT-4's performance lags at about 74%, and other LLMs demonstrate an average accuracy of around 42%. Our findings emphasize the need for targeted improvements in Korean commonsense reasoning within LLMs, paving the way for more socially and contextually sensitive AI models.

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SPAGHETTI: Open-Domain Question Answering from Heterogeneous Data Sources with Retrieval and Semantic Parsing

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