United States

There is a scarcity of multilingual vision-language models that properly account for the perceptual differences that are reflected in image captions across languages and cultures. In this work, through a multimodal, multilingual retrieval case study, we quantify the existing lack of model flexibility. We empirically show performance gaps between training on captions that come from native German perception and captions that have been either machine-translated or human-translated from English into German. To address these gaps, we further propose and evaluate caption augmentation strategies. While we achieve mean recall improvements (+1.3), gaps still remain, indicating an open area of future work for the community.

EMNLP 2024

Quantifying the Gap Between Machine Translation and Native Language in Training for Multimodal, Multilingual Retrieval

dense passage retrieval

information retrieval

knowledge distillation

poster

## 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.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

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.

Massive-scale historical document collections are crucial for social science research. Despite increasing digitization, these documents typically lack unique cross-document identifiers for individuals mentioned within the texts, as well as individual identifiers from external knowledge bases like Wikipedia/Wikidata. Existing entity disambiguation methods often fall short in accuracy for historical documents, which are replete with individuals not remembered in contemporary knowledge bases. This study makes three key contributions to improve cross-document coreference resolution and disambiguation in historical texts: a massive-scale training dataset replete with hard negatives - that sources over 190 million entity pairs from Wikipedia contexts and disambiguation pages - high-quality evaluation data from hand-labeled historical newswire articles, and trained models evaluated on this historical benchmark. We contrastively train bi-encoder models for coreferencing and disambiguating individuals in historical texts, achieving accurate, scalable performance that identifies out-of-knowledge base individuals. Our approach significantly surpasses other entity disambiguation models on our historical newswire benchmark. Our models also demonstrate competitive performance on modern entity disambiguation benchmarks, particularly on certain news disambiguation datasets.

Contrastive Entity Coreference and Disambiguation for Historical Texts

Large language models such as ChatGPT exhibit striking political biases. If users query them about political information, they often take a normative stance. To overcome this, we align LLMs with diverse political viewpoints from 100,000 comments written by candidates running for national parliament in Switzerland. Models aligned with this data can generate more accurate political viewpoints from Swiss parties, compared to commercial models such as ChatGPT. We also propose a procedure to generate balanced overviews summarizing multiple viewpoints using such models. The replication package contains all code and data.

Aligning Large Language Models with Diverse Political Viewpoints

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have become pivotal at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing. However, the full potential of LVLMs' Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities remains underutilized. Existing works either focus solely on the text modality or are limited to specific tasks. Moreover, most LVLMs struggle to selectively utilize retrieved information and are sensitive to irrelevant or misleading references. To address these challenges, we propose a self-refinement framework designed to teach LVLMs to \textbf{S}electively \textbf{U}tilize \textbf{R}etrieved In\textbf{f}ormation (SURf). Specifically, when given questions that are incorrectly answered by the LVLM backbone, we obtain references that help correct the answers (positive references) and those that do not (negative references). We then fine-tune the LVLM backbone using a combination of these positive and negative references. Our experiments across three tasks and seven datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances LVLMs’ ability to effectively utilize retrieved multimodal references and improves their robustness against irrelevant or misleading information. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SURf-6433.

SURf: Teaching Large Vision-Language Models to Selectively Utilize Retrieved Information

Scientific leaderboards are standardized ranking systems that facilitate evaluating and comparing competitive methods. Typically, a leaderboard is defined by a task, dataset, and evaluation metric (TDM) triple, allowing objective performance assessment and fostering innovation through benchmarking. However, the exponential increase in publications has made it infeasible to construct and maintain these leaderboards manually. Automatic leaderboard construction has emerged as a solution to reduce manual labor. Existing datasets for this task are based on the community-contributed leaderboards without additional curation. Our analysis shows that a large portion of these leaderboards are incomplete, and some of them contain incorrect information. In this work, we present SciLead, a manually-curated Scientific Leaderboard dataset that overcomes the aforementioned problems. Building on this dataset, we propose three experimental settings that simulate real-world scenarios where TDM triples are fully defined, partially defined, or undefined during leaderboard construction. While previous research has only explored the first setting, the latter two are more representative of real-world applications. To address these diverse settings, we develop a comprehensive LLM-based framework for constructing leaderboards. Our experiments and analysis reveal that various LLMs often correctly identify TDM triples while struggling to extract result values from publications. We make our code and data publicly available.

Efficient Performance Tracking: Leveraging Large Language Models for Automated Construction of Scientific Leaderboards

Nested Named Entity Recognition (NER) poses a significant challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP), demanding sophisticated techniques to identify entities within entities. This research investigates the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to nested NER, exploring methodologies from prior work and introducing specific reasoning techniques and instructions to improve LLM efficacy. Through experiments conducted on the ACE 2004, ACE 2005, and GENIA datasets, we evaluate the impact of these approaches on nested NER performance. Results indicate that output format critically influences nested NER performance, methodologies from previous works are less effective, and our nested NER-tailored instructions significantly enhance performance. Additionally, we find that label information and descriptions of nested cases are crucial in eliciting the capabilities of LLMs for nested NER, especially in specific domains (i.e., the GENIA dataset). However, these methods still do not outperform BERT-based models, highlighting the ongoing need for innovative approaches in nested NER with LLMs.

Exploring Nested Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models: Methods, Challenges, and Insights

This paper explores the utilization of LLMs for data preprocessing (DP), a crucial step in the data mining pipeline that transforms raw data into a clean format. We instruction-tune local LLMs as universal DP task solvers that operate on a local, single, and low-priced GPU, ensuring data security and enabling further customization. We select a collection of datasets across four representative DP tasks and construct instruction data using data configuration, knowledge injection, and reasoning data distillation techniques tailored to DP. By tuning Mistral-7B, Llama 3-8B, and OpenOrca-Platypus2-13B, our models, Jellyfish-7B/8B/13B, deliver competitiveness compared to GPT-3.5/4 models and strong generalizability to unseen tasks while barely compromising the base models' abilities in NLP tasks. Meanwhile, Jellyfish offers enhanced reasoning capabilities compared to GPT-3.5. 

Our models are available at: https://huggingface.co/NECOUDBFM/Jellyfish

Our instruction dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/NECOUDBFM/Jellyfish-Instruct

Jellyfish: Instruction-Tuning Local Large Language Models for Data Preprocessing

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at addressing straightforward reasoning tasks, they frequently struggle with difficulties when confronted by more complex multi-step reasoning due to a range of factors. Firstly, natural language often encompasses complex relationships among entities, making it challenging to maintain a clear reasoning chain over longer spans. Secondly, the abundance of linguistic diversity means that the same entities and relationships can be expressed using different terminologies and structures, complicating the task of identifying and establishing connections between multiple pieces of information. Graphs provide an effective solution to represent data rich in relational information and capture long-term dependencies among entities. To harness the potential of graphs, our paper introduces Structure Guided Prompt, an innovative three-stage task-agnostic prompting framework designed to improve the multi-step reasoning capabilities of LLMs in a zero-shot setting. This framework explicitly converts unstructured text into a graph via LLMs and instructs them to navigate this graph using task-specific strategies to formulate responses. By effectively organizing information and guiding navigation, it enables LLMs to provide more accurate and context-aware responses. Our experiments show that this framework significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, enabling them to excel in a broader spectrum of natural language scenarios.

Structure Guided Prompt: Instructing Large Language Model in Multi-Step Reasoning by Exploring Graph Structure of the Text

Recent work has highlighted the culturally-contingent nature of commonsense knowledge. We introduce AMAMMERε, a test set of 525 multiple-choice questions designed to evaluate the commonsense knowledge of English LLMs, relative to the cultural contexts of Ghana and the United States. To create AMAMMERε, we select a set of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) from existing commonsense datasets and rewrite them in a multi-stage process involving surveys of Ghanaian and U.S. participants. In three rounds of surveys, participants from both pools are solicited to (1) write correct and incorrect answer choices, (2) rate individual answer choices on a 5-point Likert scale, and (3) select the best answer choice from the newly-constructed MCQ items, in a final validation step. By engaging participants at multiple stages, our procedure ensures that participant perspectives are incorporated both in the creation and validation of test items, resulting in high levels of agreement within each pool. We evaluate several off-the-shelf English LLMs on AMAMMERε. Uniformly, models prefer answers choices that align with the preferences of U.S. annotators over Ghanaian annotators. Additionally, when test items specify a cultural context (Ghana or the U.S.), models exhibit some ability to adapt, but performance is consistently better in U.S. contexts than Ghanaian. As large resources are devoted to the advancement of English LLMs, our findings underscore the need for culturally adaptable models and evaluations to meet the needs of diverse English-speaking populations around the world.

Susu Box or Piggy Bank: Assessing Cultural Commonsense Knowledge between Ghana and the US

Although modern neural networks often generalize to new combinations of familiar concepts, the conditions that enable such compositionality have long been an open question. In this work, we study the systematicity gap in visual question answering: the performance difference between reasoning on previously seen and unseen combinations of object attributes. To test, we introduce a novel diagnostic dataset, CLEVR-HOPE. We find that the systematicity gap is not reduced by increasing the quantity of training data, but is reduced by increasing the diversity of training data. In particular, our experiments suggest that the more distinct attribute type combinations are seen during training, the more systematic we can expect the resulting model to be.

Attribute Diversity Determines the Systematicity Gap in VQA

Recently, image-based Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have made significant progress in video question-answering (VideoQA) using a frame-wise approach by leveraging large-scale pretraining in a zero-shot manner. Nevertheless, these models need to be capable of finding relevant information, extracting it, and answering the question simultaneously. Currently, existing methods perform all of these steps in a single pass without being able to adapt if insufficient or incorrect information is collected. To overcome this, we introduce a modular multi-LMM agent framework based on several agents with different roles, instructed by a Planner agent that updates its instructions using shared feedback from the other agents. Specifically, we propose TraveLER, a method that can create a plan to "**Trave**rse" through the video, ask questions about individual frames to "**L**ocate" and store key information, and then "**E**valuate" if there is enough information to answer the question. Finally, if there is not enough information, our method is able to "**R**eplan" based on its collected knowledge. Through extensive experiments, we find that the proposed TraveLER approach improves performance on several VideoQA benchmarks without the need to fine-tune on specific datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/traveler-framework/TraveLER.

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Quantifying the Gap Between Machine Translation and Native Language in Training for Multimodal, Multilingual Retrieval

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Contrastive Entity Coreference and Disambiguation for Historical Texts

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