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Increased focus on the computational efficiency of systems in natural language processing has motivated the design of efficient model architectures and improvements to underlying hardware accelerators. However, the resulting increases in computational throughput and reductions in floating point operations have not directly translated to improvements in wall-clock inference latency. We demonstrate that these discrepancies can be largely attributed to bottlenecks introduced by deep learning frameworks. We denote this phenomena as the framework tax, and observe that the disparity is growing as hardware speed increases over time. In this work, we examine this phenomena through a series of case studies analyzing the effects of model design decisions, framework paradigms, and hardware platforms on total model latency. Based on our findings, we provide actionable recommendations to researchers and practitioners aimed at narrowing the gap between efficient NLP model research and practice.

EMNLP 2023

The Framework Tax: Disparities Between Inference Efficiency in NLP Research and Deployment

latency

frameworks

efficiency

deep learning

inference

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

technical paper

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

Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR), which infers discourse relations without the help of explicit connectives, is still a crucial and challenging task for discourse parsing. Recent works tend to exploit the hierarchical structure information from the annotated senses, which demonstrate enhanced discourse relation representations can be obtained by integrating sense hierarchy. Nevertheless, the performance and robustness for IDRR are significantly constrained by the availability of annotated data. Fortunately, there is a wealth of unannotated utterances with explicit connectives, that can be utilized to acquire enriched discourse relation features. In light of such motivation, we propose a $\textbf{P}$rompt-based $\textbf{L}$ogical $\textbf{S}$emantics $\textbf{E}$nhancement (PLSE) method for IDRR. Essentially, our method seamlessly injects knowledge relevant to discourse relation into pre-trained language models through prompt-based connective prediction. Furthermore, considering the prompt-based connective prediction exhibits local dependencies due to the deficiency of masked language model (MLM) in capturing global semantics, we design a novel self-supervised learning objective based on mutual information maximization to derive enhanced representations of logical semantics for IDRR. Experimental results on PDTB 2.0 and CoNLL16 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves outstanding and consistent performance against the current state-of-the-art models.

Prompt-based Logical Semantics Enhancement for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition

Extensive work has shown that the performance and interpretability of commonsense reasoning can be improved via knowledge-augmented reasoning methods, where the knowledge that underpins the reasoning process is explicitly verbalized and utilized. However, existing implementations, including "chain-of-thought" and its variants, fall short in capturing the *introspective* nature of knowledge required in commonsense reasoning, and in accounting for the mutual adaptation between the generation and utilization of knowledge. We propose a novel method to develop an introspective commonsense reasoner, **Crystal**. To tackle commonsense problems, it first introspects for knowledge statements related to the given question, and subsequently makes an informed prediction that is grounded in the previously introspected knowledge. The knowledge introspection and knowledge-grounded reasoning modes of the model are tuned via reinforcement learning to mutually adapt, where the reward derives from the feedback given by the model itself. Experiments show that Crystal significantly outperforms both the standard supervised finetuning and chain-of-thought distilled methods, and enhances the transparency of the commonsense reasoning process. Our work ultimately validates the feasibility and potential of reinforcing a neural model with self-feedback.

Crystal: Introspective Reasoners Reinforced with Self-Feedback | VIDEO

Warning: This paper contains content that is stereotypical and may be upsetting.

This paper addresses the issue of demographic stereotypes present in Transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) and aims to deepen our understanding of how these biases are encoded in these models. To accomplish this, we introduce an easy-to-use framework for examining the stereotype-encoding behavior of PLMs through a combination of model probing and textual analyses. Our findings reveal that a small subset of attention heads within PLMs are primarily responsible for encoding stereotypes and that stereotypes toward specific minority groups can be identified using attention maps on these attention heads. Leveraging these insights, we propose an attention-head pruning method as a viable approach for debiasing PLMs, without compromising their language modeling capabilities or adversely affecting their performance on downstream tasks.

Deciphering Stereotypes in Pre-Trained Language Models | VIDEO

Language models may memorize more than just facts, including entire chunks of texts seen during training. Fair use exemptions to copyright laws typically allow for limited use of copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder, but typically for extraction of information from copyrighted materials, rather than {\em verbatim} reproduction. This work explores the issue of copyright violations and large language models through the lens of verbatim memorization, focusing on possible redistribution of copyrighted text. We present experiments with a range of language models over a collection of popular books and coding problems, providing a conservative characterization of the extent to which language models can redistribute these materials. Overall, this research highlights the need for further examination and the potential impact on future developments in natural language processing to ensure adherence to copyright regulations. Code is at https://github.com/coastalcph/CopyrightLLMs.

Copyright Violations and Large Language Models | VIDEO

Modern work on the cross-linguistic computational modeling of morphological inflection has typically employed language-independent data splitting algorithms. In this paper, we supplement that approach with language-specific probes designed to test aspects of morphological generalization. Testing these probes on three morphologically distinct languages, English, Spanish, and Swahili, we find evidence that three leading morphological inflection systems employ distinct generalization strategies over conjugational classes and feature sets on both orthographic and phonologically transcribed inputs.

Exploring Linguistic Probes for Morphological Inflection

Lemmatization is a natural language processing (NLP) task which consists of producing, from a given inflected word, its canonical form or lemma. Lemmatization is one of the basic tasks that facilitate downstream NLP applications, and is of particular importance for high-inflected languages. Given that the process to obtain a lemma from an inflected word can be explained by looking at its morphosyntactic category, including fine-grained morphosyntactic information to train contextual lemmatizers has become common practice, without considering whether that is the optimum in terms of downstream performance. In order to address this issue, in this paper we empirically investigate the role of morphological information to develop contextual lemmatizers in six languages within a varied spectrum of morphological complexity: Basque, Turkish, Russian, Czech, Spanish and English. Furthermore, and unlike the vast majority of previous work, we also evaluate lemmatizers in out-of-domain settings, which constitutes, after all, their most common application use. The results of our study are rather surprising. It turns out that providing lemmatizers with fine-grained morphological features during training is not that beneficial, not even for agglutinative languages. In fact, modern contextual word representations seem to implicitly encode enough morphological information to obtain competitive contextual lemmatizers without seeing any explicit morphological signal. Moreover, our experiments suggest that the best lemmatizers out-of-domain are those using simple UPOS tags or those trained without morphology and, finally, that current evaluation practices for lemmatization are not adequate to clearly discriminate between models.

On the Role of Morphological Information for Contextual Lemmatization

Entity linking is a prominent thread of research focused on structured data creation by linking spans of text to an ontology or knowledge source. We revisit the use of structured prediction for entity linking which classifies each individual input token as an entity, and aggregates the token predictions. Our system, called SpEL (Structured prediction for Entity Linking) is a state-of-the-art entity linking system that uses some new ideas to apply structured prediction to the task of entity linking including: two refined fine-tuning steps; a context sensitive prediction aggregation strategy; reduction of the size of the model's output vocabulary, and; we address a common problem in entity-linking systems where there is a training vs. inference tokenization mismatch. Our experiments show that we can outperform the state-of-the-art on the commonly used AIDA benchmark dataset for entity linking to Wikipedia. Our method is also very compute efficient in terms of number of parameters and speed of inference.

SpEL: Structured Prediction for Entity Linking | VIDEO

Transformer-based language models (LMs) are known to capture factual knowledge in their parameters. While previous work looked into where factual associations are stored, only little is known about how they are retrieved internally during inference. We investigate this question through the lens of information flow. Given a subject-relation query, we study how the model aggregates information about the subject and relation to predict the correct attribute. With interventions on attention edges, we first identify two critical points where information propagates to the prediction: one from the relation positions followed by another from the subject positions. Next, by analyzing the information at these points, we unveil a three-step internal mechanism for attribute extraction. First, the representation at the last-subject position goes through an enrichment process, driven by the early MLP sublayers, to encode many subject-related attributes. Second, information from the relation propagates to the prediction. Third, the prediction representation "queries" the enriched subject to extract the attribute. Perhaps surprisingly, this extraction is typically done via attention heads, which often encode subject-attribute mappings in their parameters. Overall, our findings introduce a comprehensive view of how factual associations are stored and extracted internally in LMs, facilitating future research on knowledge localization and editing.

Dissecting Recall of Factual Associations in Auto-Regressive Language Models | VIDEO

Video captioning aims to describe events in a video with natural language. In recent years, many works have focused on improving captioning models' performance. However, like other text generation tasks, it risks introducing factual errors not supported by the input video. Factual errors can seriously affect the quality of the generated text, sometimes making it completely unusable. Although factual consistency has received much research attention in text-to-text tasks (e.g., summarization), it is less studied in vision-based text generation. In this work, we conduct the first human evaluation of the factuality in video captioning and annotate two factuality datasets. We find that 56\% of the model-generated sentences have factual errors, indicating it is a severe problem in this field, but existing evaluation metrics show little correlation with human factuality annotation. We further propose a weakly-supervised, model-based factuality metric FactVC, which outperforms previous metrics on factuality evaluation of video captioning.

Models See Hallucinations: Evaluating the Factuality in Video Captioning

Evaluating the factuality of long-form text generated by large language models (LMs) is non-trivial because (1) generations often contain a mixture of supported and unsupported pieces of information, making binary judgments of quality inadequate, and (2) human evaluation is time-consuming and costly. In this paper, we introduce FACTSCORE, a new evaluation that breaks a generation into a series of atomic facts and computes the percentage of atomic facts supported by a reliable knowledge source. We conduct an extensive human evaluation to obtain FACTSCOREs of people biographies generated by several state-of-the-art commercial LMs—InstructGPT, ChatGPT, and the retrieval-augmented PerplexityAI—and report new analysis demonstrating the need for such a fine-grained score (e.g., ChatGPT only achieves 58%). Since human evaluation is costly, we also introduce an automated model that estimates FACTSCORE using retrieval and a strong language model, with less than a 2% error rate. Finally, we use this automated metric to evaluate 6,500 generations from a new set of 13 recent LMs that would have cost $26K if evaluated by humans, with various findings: GPT-4 and ChatGPT are more factual than public models, and Vicuna and Alpaca are some of the best public models. FACTSCORE is available for public use via `pip install factscore`.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Prompt-based Logical Semantics Enhancement for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition

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Algorithms and Systems for Efficient Inference in Generative AI

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