Canada

Large language models (LLMs) have a substantial capacity for high-level analogical reasoning: reproducing patterns in linear text that occur in their training data (zero-shot evaluation) or in the provided context (few-shot in-context learning). However, recent studies show that even the more advanced LLMs fail in scenarios that require reasoning over multiple objects or facts and making sequences of logical deductions. We propose a two-stage probabilistic inference paradigm, ThinkSum, which reasons over sets of objects or facts in a structured manner. In the first stage (Think -- retrieval of associations), a LLM is queried in parallel over a set of phrases extracted from the prompt or an auxiliary model call. In the second stage (Sum -- probabilistic inference or reasoning), the results of these queries are aggregated to make the final prediction. We demonstrate the possibilities and advantages of ThinkSum on the BIG-bench suite of LLM evaluation tasks, achieving improvements over the state of the art using GPT-family models on thirteen difficult tasks, often with far smaller model variants. We also compare and contrast ThinkSum with other proposed modifications to direct prompting of LLMs, such as variants of chain-of-thought prompting. Our results suggest that because the probabilistic inference in ThinkSum is performed outside of calls to the LLM, ThinkSum is less sensitive to prompt design, yields more interpretable predictions, and can be flexibly combined with latent variable models to extract structured knowledge from LLMs. Overall, our proposed paradigm represents a promising approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

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ACL 2023

ThinkSum: Probabilistic reasoning over sets using large language models

prompting techniques

probabilistic inference

large language models

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)<br><br><br>

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)<br><br> 

AAAI 2025

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.



Large language models (LLMs) have a substantial capacity for high-level analogical reasoning: reproducing patterns in linear text that occur in their training data (zero-shot evaluation) or in the provided context (few-shot in-context learning). However, recent studies show that even the more advanced LLMs fail in scenarios that require reasoning over multiple objects or facts and making sequences of logical deductions. We propose a two-stage probabilistic inference paradigm, ThinkSum, which reasons over sets of objects or facts in a structured manner. In the first stage (Think -- retrieval of associations), a LLM is queried in parallel over a set of phrases extracted from the prompt or an auxiliary model call. In the second stage (Sum -- probabilistic inference or reasoning), the results of these queries are aggregated to make the final prediction. We demonstrate the possibilities and advantages of ThinkSum on the BIG-bench suite of LLM evaluation tasks, achieving improvements over the state of the art using GPT-family models on thirteen difficult tasks, often with far smaller model variants. We also compare and contrast ThinkSum with other proposed modifications to direct prompting of LLMs, such as variants of chain-of-thought prompting. Our results suggest that because the probabilistic inference in ThinkSum is performed outside of calls to the LLM, ThinkSum is less sensitive to prompt design, yields more interpretable predictions, and can be flexibly combined with latent variable models to extract structured knowledge from LLMs. Overall, our proposed paradigm represents a promising approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

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poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience.<br>
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**
<br><br><br><br>

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

In this work, we study the robustness of two typical terminology translation methods: Placeholder (PH) and Code-Switch (CS), concerning (1) the number of constraints and (2) the target constraint length. We identify that existing terminology constraint test sets, such as IATE, Wiktionary, and TICO, are blind to this issue due to oversimplified constraint settings. To solve it, we create a new challenging test set of English-German, increasing the average constraint count per sentence from 1.1$\sim$1.7 to 6.1 and the length per target constraint from 1.1$\sim$1.2 words to 3.4 words. Then we find that PH and CS methods degrade as the number of constraints increases, but they have complementary strengths. Specifically, PH is better at retaining high constraint accuracy but lower translation quality as measured by BLEU and COMET scores. In contrast, CS has the opposite results. Based on these observations, we propose a simple but effective method combining the advantages of PH and CS. This approach involves training a model like PH to predict the term labels, and then during inference replacing those labels with target terminology text like CS, so that the subsequent generation is aware of the target term content. Extensive experimental results show that this approach can achieve high constraint accuracy and translation quality simultaneously, regardless of the number or length of constraints.

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Understanding and Improving the Robustness of Terminology Constraints in Neural Machine Translation

Due to the complex label hierarchy and intensive labeling cost in practice, the hierarchical text classification (HTC) suffers a poor performance especially when low-resource or few-shot settings are considered. Recently, there is a growing trend of applying prompts on pre-trained language models (PLMs), which has exhibited effectiveness in the few-shot flat text classification tasks. However, limited work has studied the paradigm of prompt-based learning in the HTC problem when the training data is extremely scarce. In this work, we define a path-based few-shot setting and establish a strict path-based evaluation metric to further explore few-shot HTC tasks. To address the issue, we propose the hierarchical verbalizer ("HierVerb"), a multi-verbalizer framework treating HTC as a single- or multi-label classification problem at multiple layers and learning vectors as verbalizers constrained by hierarchical structure and hierarchical contrastive learning. In this manner, HierVerb fuses label hierarchy knowledge into verbalizers and remarkably outperforms those who inject hierarchy through graph encoders, maximizing the benefits of PLMs. Extensive experiments on three popular HTC datasets under the few-shot settings demonstrate that prompt with HierVerb significantly boosts the HTC performance, meanwhile indicating an elegant way to bridge the gap between the large pre-trained model and downstream hierarchical classification tasks.

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Hierarchical Verbalizer for Few-Shot Hierarchical Text Classification

Recent studies have shown that dual encoder models trained with the sentence-level translation ranking task are effective methods for cross-lingual sentence embedding. However, our research indicates that token-level alignment is also crucial in multilingual scenarios, which has not been fully explored previously. Based on our findings, we propose a dual-alignment pre-training (DAP) framework for cross-lingual sentence embedding that incorporates both sentence-level and token-level alignment. To achieve this, we introduce a novel representation translation learning (RTL) task, where the model learns to use one-side contextualized token representation to reconstruct its translation counterpart. This reconstruction objective encourages the model to embed translation information into the token representation. Compared to other token-level alignment methods such as translation language modeling, RTL is more suitable for dual encoder architectures and is computationally efficient. Extensive experiments on three sentence-level cross-lingual benchmarks demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve sentence embedding. Our code is available at https://github.com/ChillingDream/DAP.

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Dual-Alignment Pre-training for Cross-lingual Sentence Embedding

Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) measures the degree to which the underlying semantics of paired sentences are equivalent. State-of-the-art methods for STS task use language models to encode sentences into embeddings. However, these embeddings are limited in representing semantics because they mix all the semantic information together in fixed-length vectors, which are difficult to recover and lack explainability. This paper presents a token-level matching inference algorithm, which can be applied on top of any language model to improve its performance on STS task. Our method calculates pairwise token-level similarity and token matching scores, and then aggregates them with pretrained token weights to produce sentence similarity. Experimental results on seven STS datasets show that our method improves the performance of almost all language models, with up to 12.7% gain in Spearman's correlation. We also demonstrate that our method is highly explainable and computationally efficient.

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Going Beyond Sentence Embeddings: A Token-Level Matching Algorithm for Calculating Semantic Textual Similarity

Dialogue summarization has recently garnered significant attention due to its wide range of applications. However, existing methods for summarizing dialogues have limitations because they do not take into account the inherent structure of dialogue and rely heavily on labeled data, which can lead to poor performance in new domains. In this work, we propose DIONYSUS (dynamic input optimization in pre-training for dialogue summarization), a pre-trained encoder-decoder model for summarizing dialogues in any new domain. To pre-train DIONYSUS, we create two pseudo summaries for each dialogue example: one from a fine-tuned summarization model and the other from important dialogue turns. We then choose one of these pseudo summaries based on information distribution differences in different types of dialogues. This selected pseudo summary serves as the objective for pre-training DIONYSUS using a self-supervised approach on a large dialogue corpus. Our experiments show that DIONYSUS outperforms existing methods on six datasets, as demonstrated by its ROUGE scores in zero-shot and few-shot settings

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DIONYSUS: A Pre-trained Model for Low-Resource Dialogue Summarization

Previous work on controllable text generation has explored the idea of control from the latent space, such as optimizing a representation with attribute-specific classifiers or sampling one from relevant discrete samples. However, they cannot effectively model a complex space with diverse attributes, high dimensionality, and asymmetric structure, leaving subsequent controls unsatisfying. In this work, we propose a novel control framework using probability density estimation in the latent space. Our method utilizes an invertible transformation function, the Normalizing Flow, that maps the complex distributions in the latent space to simple Gaussian distributions in the prior space. Thus, we can perform sophisticated and flexible controls in the prior space and feed the control effects back into the latent space owing to the bijection property of invertible transformations. Experiments on single-attribute and multi-attribute control reveal that our method outperforms several strong baselines on attribute relevance and text quality, achieving a new SOTA. Further analysis of control strength adjustment demonstrates the flexibility of our control strategy.

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Controllable Text Generation via Probability Density Estimation in the Latent Space

There has been a surge of interest in utilizing Knowledge Graphs (KGs) for various natural language processing/understanding tasks. The conventional mechanism to retrieve facts in KGs usually involves three steps: entity span detection, entity disambiguation, and relation classification. However, this approach requires additional labels for training each of the three subcomponents in addition to pairs of input texts and facts, and also may accumulate errors propagated from failures in previous steps. To tackle these limitations, we propose a simple knowledge retrieval framework, which directly retrieves facts from the KGs given the input text based on their representational similarities, which we refer to as Direct Fact Retrieval (DiFaR). Specifically, we first embed all facts in KGs onto a dense embedding space by using a language model trained by only pairs of input texts and facts, and then provide the nearest facts in response to the input text. Since the fact, consisting of only two entities and one relation, has little context to encode, we propose to further refine ranks of top-k retrieved facts with a reranker that contextualizes the input text and the fact jointly. We validate our DiFaR framework on multiple fact retrieval tasks, showing that it significantly outperforms relevant baselines that use the three-step approach.

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Direct Fact Retrieval from Knowledge Graphs without Entity Linking

Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE) aims to identify the document's emotion clauses and corresponding cause clauses. Like other relation extraction tasks, ECPE is closely associated with the relationship between sentences. Recent methods based on Graph Convolutional Networks focus on how to model the multiplex relations between clauses by constructing different edges. However, the data of emotions, causes, and pairs are extremely unbalanced, and current methods get their representation using the same graph structure. In this paper, we propose a **J**oint **C**onstrained Learning framework with **B**oundary-adjusting for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (**JCB**). Specifically, through constrained learning, we summarize the prior rules existing in the data and force the model to take them into consideration in optimization, which helps the model learn a better representation from unbalanced data. Furthermore, we adjust the decision boundary of classifiers according to the relations between subtasks, which have always been ignored. No longer working independently as in the previous framework, the classifiers corresponding to three subtasks cooperate under the relation constraints. Experimental results show that **JCB** obtains competitive results compared with state-of-the-art methods and prove its robustness on unbalanced data.

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Joint Constrained Learning with Boundary-adjusting for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction

Automating Cross-lingual Science Journalism (CSJ) aims to generate popular science summaries from English scientific texts for non-expert readers in their local language. We introduce CSJ as a downstream task of text simplification and cross-lingual scientific summarization to facilitate science journalists' work. We analyze the performance of possible existing solutions as baselines for the CSJ task. Based on these findings, we propose to combine the three components - SELECT, SIMPLIFY and REWRITE (SSR) to produce cross-lingual simplified science summaries for non-expert readers. Our empirical evaluation on the Wikipedia dataset shows that SSR significantly outperforms the baselines for the CSJ task and can serve as a strong baseline for future work. We also perform an ablation study investigating the impact of individual components of SSR. Further, we analyze the performance of SSR on a high-quality, real-world CSJ dataset with human evaluation and in-depth analysis, demonstrating the superior performance of SSR for CSJ.

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Cross-lingual Science Journalism: Select, Simplify and Rewrite Summaries for Non-expert Readers

In many task settings, text classification models are likely to encounter examples from novel classes on which they cannot predict correctly. Selective prediction, in which models abstain on low-confidence examples, provides a possible solution, but existing models are often overly confident on unseen classes. To remedy this overconfidence, we introduce Contrastive Novelty-Augmented Learning (CoNAL), a two-step method that generates OOD examples representative of novel classes, then trains to decrease confidence on them. First, we generate OOD examples by prompting a large language model twice: we prompt it to enumerate relevant novel classes, then generate examples from each novel class matching the task format. Second, we train a classifier with a novel contrastive objective that encourages lower confidence on generated OOD examples than training examples. When trained with CoNAL, classifiers improve in their ability to detect and abstain on novel class examples over prior methods by an average of 2.3% in terms of accuracy under the accuracy-coverage curve (AUAC) and 5.5% AUROC across 4 NLP datasets, with no cost to in-distribution accuracy.

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Next from ACL 2023

Understanding and Improving the Robustness of Terminology Constraints in Neural Machine Translation

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