United Arab Emirates

It has been shown that NLI models are usually biased with respect to the word-overlap between the premise and the hypothesis, as they take this feature as a primary cue for predicting the entailment label. 
In this paper, we focus on an overlooked aspect of the overlap bias in the NLI models: the reverse word-overlap bias. 
Our experimental results demonstrate that current NLI systems are also highly biased towards the non-entailment label on instances with low overlap and that existing debiasing methods, which are reportedly successful on challenge datasets, are generally ineffective in addressing this category of bias.
Through a set of analyses, we investigate the reasons for the emergence of the overlap bias and the role of minority examples in mitigating this bias.
For the former, we find that the word overlap bias does not stem from pre-training, and in the latter, we observe that in contrast to the accepted assumption, eliminating minority examples does not affect the generalizability of debiasing methods with respect to the overlap bias.

EMNLP 2022

Looking at the Overlooked: An Analysis on the Word-Overlap Bias in Natural Language Inference

word-overlap bias

dataset bias

natural language inference

**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

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

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

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Contrastive learning has been the dominant approach to training dense retrieval models. In this work, we investigate the impact of ranking context - an often overlooked aspect of learning dense retrieval models. In particular, we examine the effect of its constituent parts: jointly scoring a large number of negatives per query, using retrieved (query-specific) instead of random negatives, and a fully list-wise loss.

To incorporate these factors into training, we introduce Contextual Document Embedding Reranking (CODER), a highly efficient retrieval framework. When reranking, it incurs only a negligible computational overhead on top of a first-stage method at run time (approx. 5 ms delay per query), allowing it to be easily combined with any state-of-the-art dual encoder method. Models trained through CODER can also be used as stand-alone retrievers.

Evaluating CODER in a large set of experiments on the MS MARCO and TripClick collections, we show that the contextual reranking of precomputed document embeddings leads to a significant improvement in retrieval performance. This improvement becomes even more pronounced when more relevance information per query is available, shown in the TripClick collection, where we establish new state-of-the-art results by a large margin.

CODER: An efficient framework for improving retrieval through COntextual Document Embedding Reranking

Word-level quality scores on input source sentences can provide useful feedback to an end-user when translating into an unfamiliar target language. Recent approaches either require training special word-scoring models based on synthetic data or require repeated invocation of the translation model. We propose a simple approach based on comparing the difference of probabilities from two language models. The basic premise of our method is to reason how well each source word is explained by the target sentence as against the source language model. Our approach provides up to five points higher F1 scores and is significantly faster than the state of the art methods on three language pairs. Also, our method does not require training any new model. We release a public dataset on word omissions and mistranslations on a new language pair.

Quality Scoring of Source Words in Neural Translation Models

Backdoor attacks are a kind of emergent security threat in deep learning. After being injected with a backdoor, a deep neural model will behave normally on standard inputs but give adversary-specified predictions once the input contains specific backdoor triggers. In this paper, we find two simple tricks that can make existing textual backdoor attacks much more harmful. The first trick is to add an extra training task to distinguish poisoned and clean data during the training of the victim model, and the second one is to use all the clean training data rather than remove the original clean data corresponding to the poisoned data. These two tricks are universally applicable to different attack models. We conduct experiments in three tough situations including clean data fine-tuning, low-poisoning-rate, and label-consistent attacks. Experimental results show that the two tricks can significantly improve attack performance. This paper exhibits the great potential harmfulness of backdoor attacks. All the code and data can be obtained at \url{https://github.com/thunlp/StyleAttack}.

Textual Backdoor Attacks Can Be More Harmful via Two Simple Tricks

Music streaming services feature billions of playlists created by users, professional editors or algorithms. In this content overload scenario, it is crucial to characterise playlists, so that music can be effectively organised and accessed. Playlist titles and descriptions are proposed in natural language either manually by music editors and users or automatically from pre-defined templates. However, the former is time-consuming while the latter is limited by the vocabulary and covered music themes. 
In this work, we propose PlayNTell, a data-efficient multi-modal encoder-decoder model for automatic playlist captioning. Compared to existing music captioning algorithms, PlayNTell leverages also linguistic and musical knowledge to generate correct and thematic captions. We benchmark PlayNTell on a new editorial playlists dataset collected from two major music streaming services.
PlayNTell yields 2x-3x higher BLEU@4 and CIDEr than state of the art captioning algorithms.

Data-Efficient Playlist Captioning With Musical and Linguistic Knowledge

In natural language understanding (NLU) production systems, users' evolving needs necessitate the addition of new features over time, indexed by new symbols added to the meaning representation space. This requires additional training data and results in ever-growing datasets. We present the first systematic investigation into this incremental symbol learning scenario. Our analysis reveals a troubling quirk in building broad-coverage NLU systems: as the training dataset grows, performance on a small set of new symbols often decreases. We show that this trend holds for multiple mainstream models on two common NLU tasks: intent recognition and semantic parsing. Rejecting class imbalance as the sole culprit, we reveal that the trend is closely associated with an effect we call source signal dilution, where strong lexical cues for the new symbol become diluted as the training dataset grows. Selectively dropping training examples to prevent dilution often reverses the trend, showing the over-reliance of mainstream neural NLU models on simple lexical cues.

When More Data Hurts: A Troubling Quirk in Developing Broad-Coverage Natural Language Understanding Systems

While there has been substantial progress in text comprehension through simple factoid question answering, more holistic comprehension of a discourse still presents a major challenge (Dunietz et al., 2020). Someone critically reflecting on a text as they read it will pose curiosity-driven, often open-ended questions, which reflect deep understanding of the content and require complex reasoning to answer (Ko et al., 2020; Westera et al., 2020). A key challenge in building and evaluating models for this type of discourse comprehension is the lack of annotated data, especially since collecting answers to such questions requires high cognitive load for annotators.

This paper presents a novel paradigm that enables scalable data collection targeting the comprehension of news documents, viewing these questions through the lens of discourse. The resulting corpus, DCQA (Discourse Comprehension by Question Answering), captures both discourse and semantic links between sentences in the form of free-form, open-ended questions. On an evaluation set that we annotated on questions from Ko et al. (2020), we show that DCQA provides valuable supervision for answering open-ended questions. We additionally design pre-training methods utilizing existing question-answering resources, and use synthetic data to accommodate unanswerable questions.

Discourse Comprehension: A Question Answering Framework to Represent Sentence Connections

Semantic Overlap Summarization (SOS) is a novel and relatively under-explored seq-to-seq task which entails summarizing common information from multiple alternate narratives. One of the major challenges for solving this task is the lack of existing datasets for supervised training. To address this challenge, we propose a novel data augmentation technique, which allows us to create large amount of synthetic data for training a seq-to-seq model that can perform the SOS task. Through extensive experiments using narratives from the news domain, we show that the models fine-tuned using the synthetic dataset provide significant performance improvements over the pre-trained vanilla summarization techniques and are close to the models fine-tuned on the golden training data; which essentially demonstrates the effectiveness of out proposed data augmentation technique for training seq-to-seq models on the SOS task.

Learning to Generate Overlap Summaries through Noisy Synthetic Data

An important task for designing QA systems is answer sentence selection (AS2): selecting the sentence containing (or constituting) the answer to a question from a set of retrieved relevant documents. In this paper, we propose three novel sentence-level transformer pre-training objectives that incorporate paragraph-level semantics within and across documents, to improve the performance of transformers for AS2, and mitigate the requirement of large labeled datasets. Specifically, the model is tasked to predict whether: (i) two sentences are extracted from the same paragraph, (ii) a given sentence is extracted from a given paragraph, and (iii) two paragraphs are extracted from the same document. Our experiments on three public and one industrial AS2 datasets demonstrate the empirical superiority of our pre-trained transformers over baseline models such as RoBERTa and ELECTRA for AS2.

Pre-training Transformer Models with Sentence-Level Objectives for Answer Sentence Selection

We suggest a model for partial diacritization of deep orthographies. We focus on Arabic, where the optional indication of selected vowels by means of diacritics can resolve ambiguity and improve readability. Our partial diacritizer restores short vowels only when they contribute to the ease of understandability during reading a given running text. The idea is to identify those uncertainties of absent vowels that require the reader to look ahead to disambiguate. To achieve this, two independent neural networks are employed for predicting diacritics, one that takes the entire sentence as input and another that considers only the text that has been read thus far. Partial diacritization is then determined by retaining precisely those vowels on which the two networks disagree, preferring the reading based on consideration of the whole sentence over the more naive reading-order diacritization. For evaluation, we prepared a new dataset of Arabic texts with both full and partial vowelization. In addition to facilitating readability, we find that our partial diacritizer improves translation quality compared either to their total absence or to random selection. Lastly, we study the benefit of knowing the text that follows the word in focus towards the restoration of short vowels during reading, and we measure the degree to which lookahead contributes to resolving ambiguities encountered while reading.

How Much Does Lookahead Matter for Disambiguation? Partial Arabic Diacritization Case Study

Peer review is a key component of the publishing process in most fields of science. Increasing submission rates put a strain on reviewing quality and efficiency, motivating the development of applications to support the reviewing and editorial work. While existing NLP studies focus on the analysis of individual texts, editorial assistance often requires modeling interactions between pairs of texts—yet general frameworks and datasets to support this scenario are missing. Relationships between texts are the core object of the intertextuality theory—a family of approaches in literary studies not yet operationalized in NLP. Inspired by prior theoretical work, we propose the first intertextual model of text-based collaboration, which encompasses three major phenomena that make up a full iteration of the review–revise–and–resubmit cycle: pragmatic tagging, linking, and long-document version alignment. While peer review is used across the fields of science and publication formats, existing datasets solely focus on conference-style review in computer science. Addressing this, we instantiate our proposed model in the first annotated multidomain corpus in journal-style post-publication open peer review, and provide detailed insights into the practical aspects of intertextual annotation. Our resource is a major step toward multidomain, fine-grained applications of NLP in editorial support for peer review, and our intertextual framework paves the path for general-purpose modeling of text-based collaboration. We make our corpus, detailed annotation guidelines, and accompanying code publicly available.

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CODER: An efficient framework for improving retrieval through COntextual Document Embedding Reranking

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Next from EMNLP 2022

CODER: An efficient framework for improving retrieval through COntextual Document Embedding Reranking

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Improving Bias Mitigation through Bias Experts in Natural Language Understanding

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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