Canada

We approach competitive-level programming problem-solving as a compos- ite task of reasoning and code generation. We propose a novel method to automatically anno- tate natural language explanations to &lt;problem, solution&gt; pairs. We show that despite poor per- formance in solving competitive-level program- ming problems, state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit a strong capacity in describing and explaining solutions. Our explanation generation method- ology can generate a structured solution expla- nation for the problem containing descriptions and analysis. To evaluate the quality of the annotated explanations, we examine their effec- tiveness in two aspects: 1) satisfying the human programming expert who authored the oracle solution, and 2) aiding LLMs in solving prob- lems more effectively. The experimental results on the CodeContests dataset demonstrate that while LLM GPT3.5’s and GPT-4’s abilities in describing the solution are comparable, GPT-4 shows a better understanding of the key idea behind the solution.

ACL 2023

Explaining Competitive-Level Programming Solutions using LLMs

algorithmic reasoning problem

code comprehension

explanation generation

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

EMNLP 2025

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

We approach competitive-level programming problem-solving as a compos- ite task of reasoning and code generation. We propose a novel method to automatically anno- tate natural language explanations to <problem, solution> pairs. We show that despite poor per- formance in solving competitive-level program- ming problems, state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit a strong capacity in describing and explaining solutions. Our explanation generation method- ology can generate a structured solution expla- nation for the problem containing descriptions and analysis. To evaluate the quality of the annotated explanations, we examine their effec- tiveness in two aspects: 1) satisfying the human programming expert who authored the oracle solution, and 2) aiding LLMs in solving prob- lems more effectively. The experimental results on the CodeContests dataset demonstrate that while LLM GPT3.5’s and GPT-4’s abilities in describing the solution are comparable, GPT-4 shows a better understanding of the key idea behind the solution.

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
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. 
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)**

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.

Current natural language systems designed for multi-step claim validation typically operate in two phases: retrieve a set of relevant premise statements using heuristics (planning), then generate novel conclusions from those statements using a large language model (deduction). The planning step often requires expensive Transformer operations and does not scale to arbitrary numbers of premise statements. In this paper, we investigate whether an efficient planning heuristic is possible via embedding spaces compatible with deductive reasoning. Specifically, we evaluate whether embedding spaces exhibit a property we call deductive additivity: the sum of premise statement embeddings should be close to embeddings of conclusions based on those premises. We explore multiple sources of off-the-shelf dense embeddings in addition to fine-tuned embeddings from GPT3 and sparse embeddings from BM25. We study embedding models both intrinsically, evaluating whether the property of deductive additivity holds, and extrinsically, using them to assist planning in natural language proof generation. Lastly, we create a dataset, Single-Step Reasoning Contrast (SSRC), to further probe performance on various reasoning types. Our findings suggest that while standard embedding methods frequently embed conclusions near the sums of their premises, they fall short of being effective heuristics and lack the ability to model certain categories of reasoning.

Deductive Additivity for Planning of Natural Language Proofs

The ease and speed of spreading misinformation and propaganda on the Web motivate the need to develop trustworthy technology for detecting fallacies in natural language arguments. However, state-of-the-art language modeling methods exhibit a lack of robustness on tasks like logical fallacy classification that require complex reasoning. In this paper, we propose a Case-Based Reasoning method that classifies new cases of logical fallacy by language-modeling-driven retrieval and adaptation of historical cases. We design four complementary strategies to enrich input representation for our model, based on external information about goals, explanations, counterarguments, and argument structure. Our experiments in in-domain and out-of-domain settings indicate that Case-Based Reasoning improves the accuracy and generalizability of language models. Our ablation studies suggest that representations of similar cases have a strong impact on the model performance, that models perform well with fewer retrieved cases, and that the size of the case database has a negligible effect on the performance. Finally, we dive deeper into the relationship between the properties of the retrieved cases and the model performance.

Case-Based Reasoning with Language Models for Classification of Logical Fallacies

It has been suggested in literature that large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are able to suppress human-level performance for natural language inference (NLI) tasks. However, the failure of learning the underlying generalizations and the inconsistency to small textual perturbations rise doubt about whether models rely on adopting shallow heuristics to guess the correct label. To mitigate this issue, we propose a neural-symbolic contrastive learning framework inspired by Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) to better capture logical relationships from data. Unlike the usual methods for NLI tasks, our approach represents data as logic programs, sets of logic rules. We aim to learn an embedding space in which – the examples share as various as possible textual information with as similar as possible underlying logical meanings that are close together, and vice versa. Experimental results affirm this approach's ability to enhance the model's transferability performance.

Neural-symbolic Contrastive Learning for Cross-domain Inference

We introduce a synthetic dataset called Sentences Involving Complex Compositional Knowledge (SICCK) and a novel analysis that investigates the performance of Natural Language Inference (NLI) models to understand compositionality in logic. We produce 1,304 sentence pairs by modifying 15 examples from the SICK dataset (Marelli et al., 2014). To this end, we modify the original texts using a set of phrases – modifiers that correspond to universal quantifiers, existential quantifiers, negation, and other concept modifiers in Natural Logic (NL) (MacCartney, 2009). We use these phrases to modify the subject, verb, and object parts of the premise and hypothesis. Lastly, we annotate these modified texts with the corresponding entailment labels following NL rules. We conduct a preliminary verification of how well the change in the structural and semantic composition is captured by neural NLI models, in both zero-shot and fine-tuned scenarios. We found that the performance of NLI models under the zero-shot setting is poor, especially for modified sentences with negation and existential quantifiers. After fine-tuning this dataset, we observe that models continue to perform poorly over negation, existential and universal modifiers.

Synthetic Dataset for Evaluating Complex Compositional Knowledge for Natural Language Inference

We introduce STREET, a unified multi-task and multi-domain natural language reasoning and explanation benchmark. Unlike most existing question-answering (QA) datasets, we expect models to not only answer questions, but also produce step-by-step structured explanations describing how premises in the question are used to produce intermediate conclusions that can prove the correctness of a certain answer. We perform extensive evaluation with popular language models such as few-shot prompting GPT-3 and fine-tuned T5. We find that these models still lag behind human performance when producing such structured reasoning steps. We believe this work will provide a way for the community to better train and test systems on multi-step reasoning and explanations in natural language.

STREET: A Multi-Task Structured Reasoning and Explanation Benchmark

Early exiting can reduce the average latency of pre-trained language models (PLMs) via its adaptive inference mechanism and work with other inference speed-up methods like model pruning, thus drawing much attention from the industry. In this work, we propose a novel framework, BADGE, which consists of two off-the-shelf methods for improving PLMs' early exiting. We first address the issues of training a multi-exit PLM, the backbone model for early exiting. We propose the novel architecture of block-wise bypasses, which can alleviate the conflicts in jointly training multiple intermediate classifiers and thus improve the overall performances of multi-exit PLM while introducing negligible additional flops to the model. Second, we propose a novel divergence-based early exiting (DGE) mechanism, which obtains early exiting signals by comparing the predicted distributions of two adjacent layers' exits. Extensive experiments on three proprietary datasets and three GLUE benchmark tasks demonstrate that our method can obtain a better speedup-performance trade-off than the existing baseline methods.\footnote{Code will be made publicly available to the research community upon acceptance.}

BADGE: Speeding Up BERT Inference after Deployment via Block-wise Bypasses and Divergence-based Early Exiting

Evidence plays a crucial role in automated fact-checking. When verifying real-world claims, existing fact-checking systems either assume the evidence sentences are given or use the search snippets returned by the search engine. Such methods ignore the challenges of collecting evidence and may not provide sufficient information to verify real-world claims. Aiming at building a better fact-checking system, we propose to incorporate full text from source documents as evidence and introduce two enriched datasets. The first one is a multilingual dataset, while the second one is monolingual (English). We further develop a latent variable model to jointly extract evidence sentences from documents and perform claim verification. Experiments indicate that including source documents can provide sufficient contextual clues even when gold evidence sentences are not annotated. The proposed system is able to achieve significant improvements upon best-reported models under different settings.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/abc5af62-a831-4ab0-84a5-d93c1ab2b9ce" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Give Me More Details: Improving Fact-Checking with Latent Retrieval

Existing sentence textual similarity benchmark datasets only use a single number to summarize how similar the sentence encoder’s decision is to humans’. However, it is unclear what kind of sentence pairs a sentence encoder (SE) would consider similar. Moreover, existing SE benchmarks mainly consider sentence pairs with low lexical overlap, so it is unclear how the SEs behave when two sentences have high lexical overlap. We introduce a high-quality SE diagnostic dataset, HEROS. HEROS is constructed by transforming an original sentence into a new sentence based on certain rules to form a minimal pair, and the minimal pair has high lexical overlaps. The rules include replacing a word with a synonym, an antonym, a typo, a random word, and converting the original sentence into its negation. Different rules yield different subsets of HEROS. By systematically comparing the performance of over 60 supervised and unsupervised SEs on HEROS, we reveal that most unsupervised sentence encoders are insensitive to negation. We find the datasets used to train the SE are the main determinants of what kind of sentence pairs an SE considers similar. We also show that even if two SEs have similar performance on STS benchmarks, they can have very different behavior on HEROS. Our result reveals the blind spot of traditional STS benchmarks when evaluating SEs.

Adversarial Clean Label Backdoor Attacks and Defenses on Text Classification Systems

Though discourse parsing can help multiple NLP fields, there has been no wide language model search done on implicit discourse relation classification. This hinders researchers from fully utilizing public-available models in discourse analysis. This work is a straightforward, fine-tuned discourse performance comparison of seven pre-trained language models. We use PDTB-3, a popular discourse relation annotated dataset. Through our model search, we raise SOTA to 0.671 ACC and obtain novel observations. Some are contrary to what has been reported before (Shi and Demberg, 2019b), that sentence-level pre-training objectives (NSP, SBO, SOP) generally fail to produce the best performing model for implicit discourse relation classification. Counterintuitively, similar-sized PLMs with MLM and full attention led to better performance.

A Side-by-side Comparision of Transformers for \\English Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

Document-level context for neural machine translation (NMT) is crucial to improve the translation consistency and cohesion, the translation of ambiguous inputs, as well as several other linguistic phenomena.
Many works have been published on the topic of document-level NMT, but most restrict the system to only local context, typically including just the one or two preceding sentences as additional information.
This might be enough to resolve some ambiguous inputs, but it is probably not sufficient to capture some document-level information like the topic or style of a conversation.
When increasing the context size beyond just the local context, there are two challenges: (i) the memory usage increases exponentially (ii) the translation performance starts to degrade.
We argue that the widely-used attention mechanism is responsible for both issues.
Therefore, we propose a constrained attention variant that focuses the attention on the most relevant parts of the sequence, while simultaneously reducing the memory consumption.
For evaluation, we utilize targeted test sets in combination with novel evaluation techniques to analyze the translations in regards to specific discourse-related phenomena.
We find that our approach is a good compromise between sentence-level NMT vs attending to the full context, especially in low resource scenarios.

Next from ACL 2023

Deductive Additivity for Planning of Natural Language Proofs

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