Canada

Neural information retrieval (IR) systems have progressed rapidly in recent years, in large part due to the release of publicly available benchmarking tasks. Unfortunately, some dimensions of this progress are illusory: the majority of the popular IR benchmarks today focus exclusively on downstream task accuracy and thus conceal the costs incurred by systems that trade away efficiency for quality. Latency, hardware cost, and other efficiency considerations are paramount to the deployment of IR systems in user-facing settings. We propose that IR benchmarks structure their evaluation methodology to include not only metrics of accuracy, but also efficiency considerations such as a query latency and the corresponding cost budget for a reproducible hardware setting. For the popular IR benchmarks MS MARCO and XOR-TyDi, we show how the best choice of IR system varies according to how these efficiency considerations are chosen and weighed. We hope that future benchmarks will adopt these guidelines toward more holistic IR evaluation.

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ACL 2023

Moving Beyond Downstream Task Accuracy for Information Retrieval Benchmarking

efficiency

benchmarking

information retrieval

## 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)<br><br><br>

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

Please register!

EMNLP 2024

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.

Neural information retrieval (IR) systems have progressed rapidly in recent years, in large part due to the release of publicly available benchmarking tasks. Unfortunately, some dimensions of this progress are illusory: the majority of the popular IR benchmarks today focus exclusively on downstream task accuracy and thus conceal the costs incurred by systems that trade away efficiency for quality. Latency, hardware cost, and other efficiency considerations are paramount to the deployment of IR systems in user-facing settings. We propose that IR benchmarks structure their evaluation methodology to include not only metrics of accuracy, but also efficiency considerations such as a query latency and the corresponding cost budget for a reproducible hardware setting. For the popular IR benchmarks MS MARCO and XOR-TyDi, we show how the best choice of IR system varies according to how these efficiency considerations are chosen and weighed. We hope that future benchmarks will adopt these guidelines toward more holistic IR evaluation.

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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.

Self-attention-based models have achieved remarkable progress in short-text mining. However, the quadratic computational complexities restrict their application in long text processing. Prior works have adopted the chunking strategy to divide long documents into chunks and stack a self-attention backbone with the recurrent structure to extract semantic representation. Such an approach disables parallelization of the attention mechanism, significantly increasing the training cost and raising hardware requirements. Revisiting the self-attention mechanism and the recurrent structure, this paper proposes a novel long-document encoding model, Recurrent Attention Network (RAN), to enable the recurrent operation of self-attention. Combining the advantages from both sides, the well-designed RAN is capable of extracting global semantics in both token-level and document-level representations, making it inherently compatible with both sequential and classification tasks, respectively. Furthermore, RAN is computationally scalable as it supports parallelization on long document processing. Extensive experiments demonstrate the long-text encoding ability of the proposed RAN model on both classification and sequential tasks, showing its potential for a wide range of applications.

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Recurrent Attention Networks for Long-text Modeling

The opaqueness of deep NLP models has motivated efforts to explain how deep models predict. Recently, work has introduced hierarchical attribution explanations, which calculate attribution scores for compositional text hierarchically to capture compositional semantics. Existing work on hierarchical attributions tends to limit the text groups to a continuous text span, which we call the connecting rule. While easy for humans to read, limiting the attribution unit to a continuous span might lose important long-distance feature interactions for reflecting model predictions. In this work, we introduce a novel strategy for capturing feature interactions and employ it to build hierarchical explanations without the connecting rule. The proposed method can convert ubiquitous non-hierarchical explanations (e.g., LIME) into their corresponding hierarchical versions. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach in building high-quality hierarchical explanations.

A Hierarchical Explanation Generation Method Based on Feature Interaction Detection

Dialogue systems can leverage large pre-trained language models and knowledge to generate fluent and informative responses. However, these models are still prone to produce hallucinated responses not supported by the input source, which greatly hinders their application. The heterogeneity between external knowledge and dialogue context challenges representation learning and source integration, which further contributes to unfaithfulness. To handle this challenge and generate more faithful responses, this paper presents RHO () utilizing the representations of linked entities and relation predicates from a knowledge graph (KG). We propose (1) local knowledge grounding to combine textual embeddings with the corresponding KG embeddings; and (2) global knowledge grounding to equip RHO with multi-hop reasoning abilities via the attention mechanism. In addition, we devise a response re-ranking technique based on walks over KG sub-graphs for better conversational reasoning. Experimental results on OpenDialKG (Moon et al., 2019) show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both automatic and human evaluation by a large margin, especially in hallucination reduction (17.54% in FeQA (Durmus et al., 2020)).

RHO (ρ): Reducing Hallucination in Open-domain Dialogues with Knowledge Grounding

We present NusaCrowd, a collaborative initiative to collect and unify existing resources for Indonesian languages, including opening access to previously non-public resources. Through this initiative, we have brought together 137 datasets and 118 standardized data loaders. The quality of the datasets has been assessed manually and automatically, and their value is demonstrated through multiple experiments.NusaCrowd's data collection enables the creation of the first zero-shot benchmarks for natural language understanding and generation in Indonesian and the local languages of Indonesia. Furthermore, NusaCrowd brings the creation of the first multilingual automatic speech recognition benchmark in Indonesian and the local languages of Indonesia. Our work strives to advance natural language processing (NLP) research for languages that are under-represented despite being widely spoken.

NusaCrowd: Open Source Initiative for Indonesian NLP Resources

The task of product attribute value extraction is to identify values of an attribute from product information. Product attributes are important features, which help improve online shopping experience of customers, such as product search, recommendation and comparison. Most existing works only focus on extracting values for a set of known attributes with sufficient training data. However, with the emerging nature of e-commerce, new products with their unique set of new attributes are constantly generated from different retailers and merchants. Collecting a large number of annotations for every new attribute is costly and time consuming. Therefore, it is an important research problem for product attribute value extraction with limited data. In this work, we propose a novel prompt tuning approach with \textbf{Mix}ed \textbf{P}rompts for few-shot \textbf{A}ttribute \textbf{V}alue \textbf{E}xtraction, namely MixPAVE. Specifically, MixPAVE introduces only a small amount (< 1\%) of trainable parameters, i.e., a mixture of two learnable prompts, while keeping the existing extraction model frozen. In this way, MixPAVE not only benefits from parameter-efficient training, but also avoids model overfitting on limited training examples. Experimental results on two product benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach over several state-of-the-art baselines. A comprehensive set of ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the prompt design, as well as the efficiency of our approach.

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MixPAVE: Mix-Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Product Attribute Value Extraction

Language models have been shown to exhibit positive scaling, where performance improves as models are scaled up in terms of size, compute, or data. In this work, we introduce NeQA, a dataset consisting of questions with negation in which language models do not exhibit straightforward positive scaling. We show that this task can exhibit inverse scaling, U-shaped scaling, or positive scaling, and the three scaling trends shift in this order as we use more powerful prompting methods or model families. We hypothesize that solving NeQA depends on two subtasks: question answering (task 1) and negation understanding (task 2). We find that task 1 has linear scaling, while task 2 has sigmoid-shaped scaling with an emergent transition point, and composing these two scaling trends yields the final scaling trend of NeQA. Our work reveals and provides a way to analyze the complex scaling trends of language models.

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Beyond Positive Scaling: How Negation Impacts Scaling Trends of Language Models

Text-based personality computing (TPC) has gained many research interests in NLP. In this paper, we describe 15 challenges that we consider deserving the attention of the NLP research community. These challenges are organized by the following topics: personality taxonomies, measurement quality, datasets, performance evaluation, modelling choices, as well as ethics and fairness. When addressing each challenge, not only do we combine perspectives from both NLP and social sciences, but also offer concrete suggestions. We hope to inspire more valid and reliable TPC research.

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On Text-based Personality Computing: Challenges and Future Directions

In recent years, the main focus of research on automatic readability assessment (ARA) has shifted towards using expensive deep learning-based methods with the primary goal of increasing models' accuracy. This, however, is rarely applicable for low-resource languages where traditional handcrafted features are still widely used due to the lack of existing NLP tools to extract deeper linguistic representations. In this work, we take a step back from the technical component and focus on how linguistic aspects such as mutual intelligibility or degree of language relatedness can improve ARA in a low-resource setting. We collect short stories written in three languages in the PhilippinesTagalog, Bikol, and Cebuanoto train readability assessment models and explore the interaction of data and features in various cross-lingual setups. Our results show that the inclusion of CrossNGO, a novel specialized feature exploiting n-gram overlap applied to languages with high mutual intelligibility, significantly improves the performance of ARA models compared to the use of off-the-shelf large multilingual language models alone. Consequently, when both linguistic representations are combined, we achieve state-of-the-art results for Tagalog and Cebuano, and baseline scores for ARA in Bikol.

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Automatic Readability Assessment for Closely Related Languages

Knowing exactly how many data points need to be labeled to achieve a certain model performance is a hugely beneficial step towards reducing the overall budgets for annotation. It pertains to both active learning and traditional data annotation, and is particularly beneficial for low resource scenarios. Nevertheless, it remains a largely under-explored area of research in NLP. We therefore explored various techniques for estimating the training sample size necessary to achieve a targeted performance value. We derived a simple yet effective approach to predict the maximum achievable model performance based on small amount of training samples -- which serves as an early indicator during data annotation for data quality and sample size determination. We performed ablation studies on four language understanding tasks, and showed that the proposed approach allows us to forecast model performance within a small margin of mean absolute error (~0.9%) with only 10% data.

Revisiting Sample Size Determination in Natural Language Understanding

The rapid development of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) within recent decades shows great potential for real-world society. The current ABSA works, however, are mostly limited to the scenario of a single text piece, leaving the study in dialogue contexts unexplored. To bridge the gap between fine-grained sentiment analysis and conversational opinion mining, in this work, we introduce a novel task of conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis, namely DiaASQ, aiming to detect the quadruple of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. We manually construct a large-scale high-quality DiaASQ dataset in both Chinese and English languages. We deliberately develop a neural model to benchmark the task, which advances in effectively performing end-to-end quadruple prediction, and manages to incorporate rich dialogue-specific and discourse feature representations for better cross-utterance quadruple extraction. We hope the new benchmark will spur more advancements in the sentiment analysis community.

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Recurrent Attention Networks for Long-text Modeling

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Next from ACL 2023

Recurrent Attention Networks for Long-text Modeling

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Exploring the Practicality of Generative Retrieval on Dynamic Corpora

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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