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Despite the success of contextualized language models on various NLP tasks, it is still unclear what these models really learn. In this paper, we contribute to the current efforts of explaining such models by exploring the continuum between function and content words with respect to contextualization in BERT, based on linguistically-informed insights. In particular, we utilize scoring and visual analytics techniques: we use an existing similarity-based score to measure contextualization and integrate it into a novel visual analytics technique, presenting the model&#39;s layers simultaneously and highlighting intra-layer properties and inter-layer differences. We show that contextualization is neither driven by polysemy nor by pure context variation. We also provide insights on why BERT fails to model words in the middle of the functionality continuum.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Explaining Contextualization in Language Models using Visual Analytics

visual analytics

contextualized word embeddings

language models

## 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."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

EMNLP 2025

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

Despite the success of contextualized language models on various NLP tasks, it is still unclear what these models really learn. In this paper, we contribute to the current efforts of explaining such models by exploring the continuum between function and content words with respect to contextualization in BERT, based on linguistically-informed insights. In particular, we utilize scoring and visual analytics techniques: we use an existing similarity-based score to measure contextualization and integrate it into a novel visual analytics technique, presenting the model's layers simultaneously and highlighting intra-layer properties and inter-layer differences. We show that contextualization is neither driven by polysemy nor by pure context variation. We also provide insights on why BERT fails to model words in the middle of the functionality continuum.

technical paper

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

In recent years, reference-based and supervised summarization evaluation metrics have been widely explored. However, collecting human-annotated references and ratings are costly and time-consuming. To avoid these limitations, we propose a training-free and reference-free summarization evaluation metric. Our metric consists of a centrality-weighted relevance score and a self-referenced redundancy score. The relevance score is computed between the pseudo reference built from the source document and the given summary, where the pseudo reference content is weighted by the sentence centrality to provide importance guidance. Besides an $F_1$-based relevance score, we also design an $F_\beta$-based variant that pays more attention to the recall score. As for the redundancy score of the summary, we compute a self-masked similarity score with the summary itself to evaluate the redundant information in the summary. Finally, we combine the relevance and redundancy scores to produce the final evaluation score of the given summary. Extensive experiments show that our methods can significantly outperform existing methods on both multi-document and single-document summarization evaluation. The source code is released at \href{https://github.com/Chen-Wang-CUHK/Training-Free-and-Ref-Free-Summ-Evaluation}{https://github.com/Chen-Wang-CUHK/Training-Free-and-Ref-Free-Summ-Evaluation}.

A Training-free and Reference-free Summarization Evaluation Metric via Centrality-weighted Relevance and Self-referenced Redundancy

Short textual descriptions of entities provide summaries of their key attributes and have been shown to be useful sources of background knowledge for tasks such as entity linking and question answering. However, generating entity descriptions, especially for new and long-tail entities, can be challenging since relevant information is often scattered across multiple sources with varied content and style. We introduce DESCGEN: given mentions spread over multiple documents, the goal is to generate an entity summary description. DESCGEN consists of 37K entity descriptions from Wikipedia and Fandom, each paired with nine evidence documents on average. The documents were collected using a combination of entity linking and hyperlinks into the entity pages, which together provide high-quality distant supervision. Compared to other multi-document summarization tasks, our task is entity-centric, more abstractive, and covers a wide range of domains. We also propose a two-stage extract-then-generate baseline and show that there exists a large gap (19.9% in ROUGE-L) between state-of-art models and human performance, suggesting that the data will support signiﬁcant future work.

DESCGEN: A Distantly Supervised Datasetfor Generating Entity Descriptions

With the recent success of pre-trained models in NLP, a significant focus was put on interpreting their representations. One of the most prominent approaches is structural probing (Hewitt and Manning, 2019), where a linear projection of word embeddings is performed in order to approximate the topology of dependency structures. In this work, we introduce a new type of structural probing, where the linear projection is decomposed into 1. iso-morphic space rotation; 2. linear scaling that identifies and scales the most relevant dimensions. In addition to syntactic dependency, we evaluate our method on two novel tasks (lexical hypernymy and position in a sentence). We jointly train the probes for multiple tasks and experimentally show that lexical and syntactic information is separated in the representations. Moreover, the orthogonal constraint makes the Structural Probes less vulnerable to memorization.

Introducing Orthogonal Constraint in Structural Probes

Backdoor attacks are a kind of insidious security threat against machine learning models. After being injected with a backdoor in training, the victim model will produce adversary-specified outputs on the inputs embedded with predesigned triggers but behave properly on normal inputs during inference. As a sort of emergent attack, backdoor attacks in natural language processing (NLP) are investigated insufficiently. As far as we know, almost all existing textual backdoor attack methods insert additional contents into normal samples as triggers, which causes the trigger-embedded samples to be detected and the backdoor attacks to be blocked without much effort. In this paper, we propose to use the syntactic structure as the trigger in textual backdoor attacks. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that the syntactic trigger-based attack method can achieve comparable attack performance (almost 100% success rate) to the insertion-based methods but possesses much higher invisibility and stronger resistance to defenses. These results also reveal the significant insidiousness and harmfulness of textual backdoor attacks. All the code and data of this paper can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/HiddenKiller.

Hidden Killer: Invisible Textual Backdoor Attacks with Syntactic Trigger

Adversarial debiasing can help to learn fairer models. Previous work has assumed that both main task labels and protected attributes are available in the dataset. However, protected labels are often unavailable, or only available in limited numbers. In this paper, we propose a training strategy which needs only a small amount of protected labels in adversarial training, and propose an estimation method to transfer private-labelled instances from one dataset to another. We demonstrate the in- and cross-domain effectiveness of our method through a range of experiments.

Decoupling Adversarial Training for Fair NLP

While neural language models can generate text with remarkable fluency and coherence, controlling for factual correctness in generation remains an open research question. This major discrepancy between the surface-level fluency and the content-level correctness of neural generation has motivated a new line of research that seeks automatic metrics for evaluating the factuality of machine text. In this paper, we introduce GO FIGURE, a meta-evaluation framework for evaluating factuality evaluation metrics. We propose five necessary conditions to evaluate factuality metrics 
on diagnostic factuality data across three different summarization tasks. Our benchmark analysis on ten factuality metrics reveals that our meta-evaluation framework provides a robust and efficient evaluation that is extensible to multiple types of factual consistency and standard generation metrics, including QA metrics. It also reveals that while QA metrics generally improve over standard metrics that measure factuality across domains, performance is highly dependent on the way in which questions are generated.

GO FIGURE: A Meta Evaluation of Factuality in Summarization

Recent work has shown that Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis (ATSA) can be effectively performed by Gradual Machine Learning (GML), which begins with some automatically labeled easy instances, and then gradually labels more challenging instances by iterative factor graph inference without manual intervention. In GML, shared features serve as the medium for knowledge conveyance between unlabeled and labeled instances. However, the existing GML solution extracts features based on lexicons, which may not be accurate nor complete and thus lead to insufficient knowledge conveyance.

In this paper, we propose a Deep Neural Network (DNN) driven GML approach for ATSA, which can effectively leverage the strength of DNN in feature representation. It first uses an unsupervised neural network to cluster the automatically extracted features by their sentiment polarities. Then, it models the clustered features as factors to enable implicit knowledge conveyance for gradual inference in a factor graph. Furthermore, provided with labeled training data, we present a hybrid solution that similarly enables gradual learning by fusing the influence of DNN predictions and implicit knowledge conveyance. Finally, we have empirically evaluated the performance of the proposed approach on real benchmark data. Our extensive experiments have shown that the proposed approach consistently achieves the state-of-the-art performance across all the test datasets in both unsupervised and supervised settings and the improvement margins are considerable.

DNN-driven Gradual Machine Learning for Aspect-term Sentiment Analysis

Large-scale conversational assistants like Alexa, Siri, Cortana and Google Assistant process every utterance using multiple models for domain, intent and named entity recognition. Given the decoupled nature of model development and large traffic volumes, it is extremely difficult to identify utterances processed erroneously by such systems. We address this challenge to detect domain classification errors using offline Transformer models. We leverage N-best domain hypotheses produced by the production system and combine them with the utterance encodings from RoBERTa model. We fine-tune end-to-end in a multi-task setting using a small dataset of human-annotated utterances. We tested our approach for detecting misclassifications from one domain that accounts for <0.5% of the traffic in a large-scale conversational AI system. Our approach achieves an F1 score of 30% outperforming the bi-LSTM baseline by 16.9 points and a strong RoBERTa model by 4.8 points. We improve this further by 2.3 points to 32.3% by ensembling multiple models.

Error Detection in Large-Scale Natural Language Understanding Systems Using Transformer Models

Out-of-domain (OOD) input detection is vital in a task-oriented dialogue system since the acceptance of unsupported inputs could lead to an incorrect response of the system. This paper proposes OutFlip, a method to generate out-of-domain samples using only in-domain training dataset automatically. A white-box natural language attack method HotFlip is revised to generate out-of-domain samples instead of adversarial examples. Our evaluation results showed that integrating OutFlip-generated out-of-domain samples into the training dataset could significantly improve an intent classification model's out-of-domain detection performance.

OutFlip: Generating Examples for Unknown Intent Detection with Natural Language Attack

Automatic math problem solving has recently attracted increasing attention as a long-standing AI benchmark. In this paper, we focus on solving geometric problems, which requires a comprehensive understanding of textual descriptions, visual diagrams, and theorem knowledge. However, the existing methods were highly dependent on handcraft rules and were merely evaluated on small-scale datasets.
Therefore, we propose a Geometric Question Answering dataset GeoQA, containing 5,010 geometric problems with corresponding annotated programs, which illustrate the solving process of the given problems. Compared with another publicly available dataset GeoS, GeoQA is 25 times larger, in which the program annotations can provide a practical testbed for future research on explicit and explainable numerical reasoning. Moreover, we introduce a Neural Geometric Solver (NGS) to address geometric problems by comprehensively parsing multimodal information and generating interpretable programs. We further add multiple self-supervised auxiliary tasks on NGS to enhance cross-modal semantic representation. Extensive experiments on GeoQA validate the effectiveness of our proposed NGS and auxiliary tasks. However, the results are still significantly lower than human performance, which leaves large room for future research. Our benchmark and code are released at https://github.com/chen-judge/GeoQA

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A Training-free and Reference-free Summarization Evaluation Metric via Centrality-weighted Relevance and Self-referenced Redundancy

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Next from ACL-IJCNLP 2021

A Training-free and Reference-free Summarization Evaluation Metric via Centrality-weighted Relevance and Self-referenced Redundancy

Similar lecture

Leveraging Cognitive Complexity of Texts for Contextualization in Dense Retrieval

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