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Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) is a critical task for designing effective retrieval-based Question Answering (QA) systems. Most advancements in AS2 focus on English due to the scarcity of annotated datasets for other languages. This lack of resources prevents the training of effective AS2 models in different languages, creating a performance gap between QA systems in English and other locales. In this paper, we introduce new high-quality datasets for AS2 in five European languages (French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish), obtained through supervised Automatic Machine Translation (AMT) of existing English AS2 datasets such as ASNQ, WikiQA, and TREC-QA using a Large Language Model (LLM). We evaluated our approach and the quality of the translated datasets through multiple experiments with different Transformer architectures. The results indicate that our datasets are pivotal in producing robust and powerful multilingual AS2 models, significantly contributing to closing the performance gap between English and other languages.

EMNLP 2024

Datasets for Multilingual Answer Sentence Selection

knowledge base qa; reasoning; commonsense qa

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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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.

Emotion Recognition in conversations (ERC) involves an internal cognitive process that interprets emotional cues by using a collection of past emotional experiences. However, many existing methods struggle to decipher emotional cues in dialogues since they are insufficient in understanding the rich historical emotional context. In this work, we introduce an innovative Detective Network (DetectiveNN), a novel model that is grounded in the cognitive theory of emotion and utilizes a "recall-detect-predict" framework to imitate human emotional reasoning. This process begins by 'recalling' past interactions of a specific speaker to collect emotional cues. It then 'detects' relevant emotional patterns by interpreting these cues in the context of the ongoing conversation. Finally, it 'predicts' the speaker's current emotional state. Tested on three benchmark datasets, our approach significantly outperforms existing methods. This highlights the advantages of incorporating cognitive factors into deep learning for ERC, enhancing task efficacy and prediction accuracy.

DetectiveNN: Imitating Human Emotional Reasoning with a Recall-Detect-Predict Framework for Emotion Recognition in Conversations

As a type of figurative language, an East Asian idiom condenses rich cultural background into only a few characters. Translating such idioms is challenging for human translators, who often resort to choosing a context-aware translation from an existing list of candidates. However, compiling a dictionary of candidate translations demands much time and creativity even for expert translators. To alleviate such burden, we evaluate if GPT-4 can help generate high-quality translations. Based on automatic evaluations of faithfulness and creativity, we first identify Pareto-optimal prompting strategies that can outperform translation engines from Google and DeepL. Then, at a low cost, our context-aware translations can achieve far more high-quality translations per idiom than the human baseline. We open-source all code and data to facilitate further research.

Creative and Context-Aware Translation of East Asian Idioms with GPT-4

Sentiment analysis (SA) aims to identify the sentiment expressed in a piece of text, often in the form of a review. Assuming a review and the sentiment associated with it, in this paper we formulate SA as a combination of two tasks: (1) a causal discovery task that distinguishes whether a review “primes” the sentiment (Causal Hypothesis C1), or the sentiment “primes” the review (Causal Hypothesis C2); and (2) the traditional prediction task to model the sentiment using the review as input. Using the peak-end rule in psychology, we classify a sample as C1 if its overall sentiment score approximates an average of all the sentence-level sentiments in the review, and as C2 if the overall sentiment score approximates an average of the peak and end sentiments. For the prediction task, we use the discovered causal mechanisms behind the samples to improve the performance of LLMs by proposing causal prompts that give the models an inductive bias of the underlying causal graph, leading to substantial improvements by up to 32.13 F1 points on zero-shot five-class SA.

On the Causal Nature of Sentiment Analysis

Existing metrics for evaluating the factuality of long-form text, such as FACTSCORE (Min et al., 2023) and SAFE (Wei et al., 2024), decompose an input text into “atomic claims” and verify each against a knowledge base like Wikipedia. These metrics are not suitable for most generation tasks because they assume that every claim is verifiable (i.e., can plausibly be proven true or false). We address this issue with VERISCORE,1 a metric for evaluating factuality in diverse long-form generation tasks that contain both verifiable and unverifiable content. VERISCORE can be effectively implemented with either closed or fine-tuned open-weight language models. Human evaluation confirms that VERISCORE’s extracted claims are more sensible than those from competing methods across eight different long-form tasks. We use VERISCORE to evaluate generations from 16 different models across multiple long-form tasks and find that while GPT-4o is the best-performing model overall, open-weight models such as Mixtral-8×22 are closing the gap. We show that an LM’s VERISCORE on one task (e.g., biography generation) does not necessarily correlate to its VERISCORE on a different task (e.g., long-form QA), highlighting the need for expanding factuality evaluation across tasks with varying fact density.

VeriScore: Evaluating the factuality of verifiable claims in long-form text generation

Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have impacted numerous sub-fields such as natural language generation, natural language inference, question answering, and more. However, in the field of question generation, the creation of distractors for multiple-choice questions (MCQ) remains a challenging task. In this work, we present a simple, generic framework for distractor generation using readily available Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Unlike previous methods, our framework relies solely on pre-trained language models and does not require additional training on specific datasets. Building upon previous research, we introduce a two-stage framework consisting of candidate generation and candidate selection. Our proposed distractor generation framework outperforms previous methods without the need for training or fine-tuning. Human evaluations confirm that our approach produces more effective and engaging distractors. The related codebase is publicly available at https://github.com/obss/disgem.

DisGeM: Distractor Generation for Multiple Choice Questions with Span Masking

With the continuous growth of online communities, understanding their similarities and dissimilarities is more crucial than ever for enhancing digital interactions, maintaining healthy interactions, and improving content recommendation and moderation systems. In this work, we present two novel techniques: BOTS for finding similarity between online communities based on their opinion, and Emb-PSR for finding similarity in the content they post. To facilitate finding the similarity based on opinion, we model the opinions on online communities using upvotes and downvotes as an indicator for community approval. Our results demonstrate that BOTS and Emb-PSR outperform existing techniques at their individual tasks while also being flexible enough to allow for cross-platform comparison of online communities. We demonstrate this novel cross-platform capability by comparing GAB with various subreddits.

Enabling Cross-Platform Comparison of Online Communities Using Content and Opinion Similarity

Psychological evidence reveals the influence of personality traits on decision-making. For instance, agreeableness is generally associated with positive outcomes in negotiations, whereas neuroticism is often linked to less favorable outcomes. This paper introduces a simulation framework centered on large language model (LLM) agents endowed with synthesized personality traits. The agents negotiate within bargaining domains and possess customizable personalities and objectives. The experimental results show that the behavioral tendencies of LLM-based simulations can reproduce behavioral patterns observed in human negotiations. The contribution is twofold. First, we propose a simulation methodology that investigates the alignment between the linguistic and economic capabilities of LLM agents. Secondly, we offer empirical insights into the strategic impacts of Big Five personality traits on the outcomes of bilateral negotiations. We also provide an in-depth analysis based on simulated bargaining dialogues to reveal intriguing behaviors, including deceitful and compromising behaviors.

How Personality Traits Influence Negotiation Outcomes? A Simulation based on Large Language Models

This exploratory study investigates the potential of multilingual Automatic Post-Editing (APE) systems to enhance the quality of machine translations for low-resource Indo-Aryan languages. Focusing on two closely related language pairs, English-Marathi and English-Hindi, we exploit the linguistic similarities to develop a robust multilingual APE model. To facilitate cross-linguistic transfer, we generate synthetic Hindi-Marathi and Marathi-Hindi APE triplets. Additionally, we incorporate a Quality Estimation (QE)-APE multi-task learning framework. While the experimental results underline the complementary nature of APE and QE, we also observe that QE-APE multitask learning facilitates effective domain adaptation. Our experiments demonstrate that the multilingual APE models outperform their corresponding English-Hindi and English-Marathi single-pair models by $2.5$ and $2.39$ TER points, respectively, with further notable improvements over the multilingual APE model observed through multi-task learning ($+1.29$ and $+1.44$ TER points), data augmentation ($+0.53$ and $+0.45$ TER points) and domain adaptation ($+0.35$ and $+0.45$ TER points). We release the synthetic data, code, and models accrued during this study publicly for further research.

Together We Can: Mulitlingual Automatic Post-Editing for Low-Resource Languages

Mental disorders pose a global challenge, aggravated by the shortage of qualified mental health professionals. Mental disorder prediction from social media posts by current LLMs is challenging due to the complexities of sequential text data and the limited context length of language models. Current language model-based approaches split a single data instance into multiple chunks to compensate for limited context size. The predictive model is then applied to each chunk individually, and the most voted output is selected as the final prediction. This results in the loss of inter-post dependencies and important time variant information, leading to poor performance. We propose a novel framework which first compresses the large sequence of chronologically ordered social media posts into a series of numbers. We then use this time variant representation for mental disorder classification. We demonstrate the generalization capabilities of our framework by outperforming the current SOTA in three different mental conditions: depression, self-harm, and anorexia, by an absolute improvement of 5% in the F1 score. We also investigate the situation when current data instances fall within the context length of language models and present empirical results highlighting the importance of temporal properties of textual data. Furthermore, we utilize the proposed framework for a cross-domain study, exploring commonalities across disorders and the possibility of inter-domain data usage.

Mental Disorder Classification via Temporal Representation of Text

In the domain of Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), generative methods have shown promising results and achieved substantial advancements. However, despite these advancements, the tasks of extracting sentiment quadruplets, which capture the nuanced sentiment expressions within a sentence, remain significant challenges. In particular, compound sentences can potentially contain multiple quadruplets, making the extraction task increasingly difficult as sentence complexity grows. To address this issue, we are focusing on simplifying sentence structures to facilitate the easier recognition of these elements and crafting a model that integrates seamlessly with various ABSA tasks. In this paper, we propose Aspect Term Oriented Sentence Splitter (ATOSS), which simplifies compound sentence into simpler and clearer forms, thereby clarifying their structure and intent. As a plug-and-play module, this approach retains the parameters of the ABSA model while making it easier to identify essential intent within input sentences. Extensive experimental results show that utilizing ATOSS outperforms existing methods in both ASQP and ACOS tasks, which are the primary tasks for extracting sentiment quadruplets

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DetectiveNN: Imitating Human Emotional Reasoning with a Recall-Detect-Predict Framework for Emotion Recognition in Conversations

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