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Large language models (LLMs) have garnered a great deal of attention for their exceptional generative performance on commonsense and reasoning tasks. In this work, we investigate LLMsâ capabilities for generalization using a particularly challenging type of statement: generics. Generics express generalizations (e.g., birds can fly) but do so without explicit quantification. They are notable because they generalize over their instantiations (e.g., sparrows can fly) yet hold true even in the presence of exceptions (e.g., penguins do not). For humans, these generic generalizations play a fundamental role in cognition, concept acquisition, and intuitive reasoning. We investigate how LLMs respond to and reason about generics.Â To this end, we first propose a framework grounded in pragmatics to automatically generate both exceptions and instantiationsâ collectively exemplars. We make use of focus â a pragmatic phenomenon that highlights meaning-bearing elements in a sentence â to capture the full range of interpretations of generics across different contexts of use. This allows us to derive precise logical definitions for exemplars and operationalize them to automatically generate exemplars from LLMs. Using our system, we generate a dataset of â 370k exemplars across â 17k generics and conduct a human validation of a sample of the generated data.Â We use our final generated dataset to investigate how LLMsâ reason about generics. Humans have a documented tendency to conflate universally quantified statements (e.g., all birds can fly) with generics. Therefore, we probe whether LLMs exhibit similar overgeneralization behavior in terms of quantification and in property inheritance. We find that LLMs do show evidence of overgeneralization, although they sometimes struggle to reason about exceptions. Furthermore, we find that LLMs may exhibit similar non-logical behavior to humans when considering property inheritance from generics.

EMNLP 2024

Exceptions, Instantiations, and Overgeneralization: Insights into How Language Models Process Generics

multimodal language model

embodied simulation

grounding

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

technical paper

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Solving grid puzzles involves a significant amount of logical reasoning. Hence, it is a good domain to evaluate reasoning capability of a model which can then guide us to improve the reasoning ability of models. However, most existing works evaluate only the final predicted answer of a puzzle, without delving into an in-depth analysis of the LLMs' reasoning chains (such as where they falter) or providing any finer metrics to evaluate them. Since LLMs may rely on simple heuristics or artifacts to predict the final answer, it is crucial to evaluate the generated reasoning chain beyond overall correctness measures, for accurately evaluating the reasoning abilities of LLMs. To this end, we first develop GridPuzzle, an evaluation dataset comprising of 274 grid-based puzzles with different complexities. Second, we propose a new error taxonomy derived from manual analysis of reasoning chains from LLMs including GPT-4, Claude-3, Gemini, Mistral, and Llama-2. Then, we develop a LLM-based framework for large-scale subjective evaluation (i.e., identifying errors) and an objective metric, PuzzleEval, to evaluate the correctness of reasoning chains. Evaluating reasoning chains from LLMs leads to several interesting findings. We further show that existing prompting methods used for enhancing models' reasoning abilities do not improve performance on GridPuzzle. This highlights the importance of understanding fine-grained errors and presents a challenge for future research to enhance LLMs' puzzle-solving abilities by developing methods that address these errors.

Step-by-Step Reasoning to Solve Grid Puzzles: Where do LLMs Falter?

We introduce SPIRIT-LM, a foundation multimodal language model that freely mixes text and speech. Our model is based on a 7B pretrained text language model that we extend to the speech modality by continuously training it on text and speech units. Speech and text sequences are concatenated as a single stream of tokens, and trained with a word-level interleaving method using a small automatically-curated speech-text parallel corpus. SPIRIT-LM comes in two versions: a BASE version that uses speech semantic units and an EXPRESSIVE version that models expressivity using pitch and style units in addition to the semantic units. For both versions, the text is encoded with subword BPE tokens. The resulting model displays both the semantic abilities of text models and the expressive abilities of speech models. Additionally, we demonstrate that SPIRIT-LM is able to learn new tasks in a few-shot fashion across modalities (i.e. ASR, TTS, Speech Classification).

SPIRIT-LM: Interleaved Spoken and Written Language Model

This study investigates the presence of biases in large language models (LLMs), specifically focusing on how these models process and reflect inter-state conflict structures. Previous research has often lacked the standardized datasets necessary for a thorough and consistent evaluation of biases in this context. Without such datasets, it is challenging to accurately assess the impact of these biases on critical applications. To address this gap, we developed a diverse and high-quality corpus using a four-phase process. This process included generating texts based on international conflict-related keywords, enhancing emotional diversity to capture a broad spectrum of sentiments, validating the coherence and connections between texts, and conducting final quality assurance through human reviewers who are experts in natural language processing. Our analysis, conducted using this newly developed corpus, revealed subtle but significant negative biases in LLMs, particularly towards Eastern bloc countries such as Russia and China. These biases have the potential to influence decision-making processes in fields like national security and international relations, where accurate, unbiased information is crucial. The findings underscore the importance of evaluating and mitigating these biases to ensure the reliability and fairness of LLMs when applied in sensitive areas.

Fifty shapes of BLiMP: syntactic learning curves in language models are not uniform, but sometimes unruly

As NLP models become increasingly integral to decision-making processes, the need for explainability and interpretability has become paramount. In this work, we propose a framework that achieves the aforementioned by generating semantically edited inputs, known as counterfactual interventions, which change the model prediction, thus providing a form of counterfactual explanations for the model. We frame the search for optimal counterfactual interventions as a graph assignment problem and employ a GNN to solve it, thus achieving high efficiency. We test our framework on two NLP tasks - binary sentiment classification and topic classification - and show that the generated edits are contrastive, fluent and minimal, while the whole process remains significantly faster than other state-of-the-art counterfactual editors.

Optimal and efficient text counterfactuals using Graph Neural Networks

Influence of Context on Token-Expert Assignments in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models

Routing in Sparsely-gated Language Models responds to Context

Sentence embeddings from transformer models encode much linguistic information in a fixed-length vector. We investigate whether structural information -- specifically, information about chunks and their structural and semantic properties -- can be detected in these representations. We use a dataset consisting of sentences with known chunk structure, and two linguistic intelligence datasets, whose solution relies on detecting chunks and their grammatical number, and respectively, their semantic roles. Through an approach involving indirect supervision, and through analyses of the performance on the tasks and of the internal representations built during learning, we show that information about chunks and their properties can be obtained from sentence embeddings.

Are there identifiable structural parts in the sentence embedding whole?

Large language models memorize portions of their training data verbatim. Our findings indicate that models exhibit higher memorization rates both early on and at the very end of their training, with the lowest rates occurring midway through the process. This phenomenon can be attributed to the models retaining most of the examples memorized early on, while forgetting many more examples as training progresses. Interestingly, these forgotten examples are sometimes re-memorized later on, often undergoing cycles of forgetting and re-memorization. Notably, examples memorized early in training are more likely to remain consistently retained, suggesting that they become more firmly ’crystallized’ in the model’s representation. Based on these insights, we tentatively recommend placing data that is more likely to be sensitive in the middle stages of the training process.

Learning, Forgetting, Remembering: Insights From Tracking LLM Memorization During Training

For induction heads to copy forward information successfully, heads in earlier layers must first load previous token information into every hidden state, a process Olsson et al. (2022) call "key shifting". While this information is hypothesized to exist, there have been few attempts to explicitly locate it in models. In this work, we use linear probes to identify the subspaces responsible for storing previous token information in Llama-2-7b and Llama-3-8b. We show that these subspaces are causally implicated in induction by using them to "edit" previous token information and trigger random token copying in new contexts.

Inducing Induction in Llama via Linear Probe Interventions

A key topic in AI and NLP today is autonomous agents, typically powered by large language models (LLMs), which can follow language instructions to complete complex tasks in real or simulated environments. While the concept of AI agents has existed since the beginning of AI, the recent shift lies in their ability to use language as a vehicle for both thought and communication, a trait previously unique to humans. This expands their ability to tackle diverse problems autonomously and sets them apart from earlier AI agents. To reflect this, the term "language agents" has been suggested, emphasizing language as their defining feature. Language played a crucial role in human cognitive evolution, and AI might be following 
a similar path. However, there has been little systematic discussion on the definition, theoretical foundations, risks, and future directions of language agents. This tutorial aims to fill that gap by providing a comprehensive exploration of language agents, linking insights from both modern and classic AI research. [Read more](https://language-agent-tutorial.github.io/)

Language Agents: Foundations, Prospects, and Risks

Explanation constitutes an archetypal feature of human rationality, underpinning learning and generalisation, and representing one of the media supporting scientific discovery and communication.
Due to the importance of explanations in human reasoning, an increasing amount of research in Natural Language Inference (NLI) has started reconsidering the role that explanations play in learning and inference, attempting to build explanation-based NLI models that can effectively encode and use natural language explanations on downstream tasks.
Research in explanation-based NLI, however, presents specific challenges and opportunities, as explanatory reasoning reflects aspects of both material and formal inference, making it a particularly rich setting to model and deliver complex reasoning.
In this tutorial, we provide a comprehensive introduction to the field of explanation-based NLI, grounding this discussion on the epistemological-linguistic foundations of explanations, systematically describing the main architectural trends and evaluation methodologies that can be used to build systems capable of explanatory reasoning. [Read more](https://sites.google.com/view/reasoning-with-explanations)

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Next from EMNLP 2024

Step-by-Step Reasoning to Solve Grid Puzzles: Where do LLMs Falter?

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Penguins Don't Fly: Reasoning about Generics through Instantiations and Exceptions

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