Singapore

Recent advances in multimodal pre-trained models have significantly improved information extraction from visually-rich documents (VrDs), in which named entity recognition (NER) is treated as a sequence-labeling task of predicting the BIO entity tags for tokens, following the typical setting of NLP. However, BIO-tagging scheme relies on the correct order of model inputs, which is not guaranteed in real-world NER on scanned VrDs where text are recognized and arranged by OCR systems. Such reading order issue hinders the accurate marking of entities by BIO-tagging scheme, making it impossible for sequence-labeling methods to predict correct named entities. To address the reading order issue, we introduce Token Path Prediction (TPP), a simple prediction head to predict entity mentions as token sequences within documents. Alternative to token classification, TPP models the document layout as a complete directed graph of tokens, and predicts token paths within the graph as entities. For better evaluation of VrD-NER systems, we also propose two revised benchmark datasets of NER on scanned documents which can reflect real-world scenarios. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and suggest its potential to be a universal solution to various information extraction tasks on documents.

EMNLP 2023

Reading Order Matters: Information Extraction from Visually-rich Documents by Token Path Prediction

document ai

multimodal learning

information extraction

## 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,
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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.

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.

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Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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

Prior studies diagnose the anisotropy problem in sentence representations from pre-trained language models, e.g., BERT, without fine-tuning. Our analysis reveals that the sentence embeddings from BERT suffer from a bias towards uninformative words, limiting the performance in semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks. To address this bias, we propose a simple and efficient unsupervised approach, Diagonal Attention Pooling (Ditto), which weights words with model-based importance estimations and computes the weighted average of word representations from pre-trained models as sentence embeddings. Ditto can be easily applied to any pre-trained language model as a postprocessing operation. Compared to prior sentence embedding approaches, Ditto does not add parameters nor requires any learning. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our proposed Ditto can alleviate the anisotropy problem and improve various pre-trained models on the STS benchmarks.

Ditto: A Simple and Efficient Approach to Improve Sentence Embeddings

Multimodal emotion recognition aims to recognize emotions for each utterance from multiple modalities, which has received increasing attention for its application in human-machine interaction. Current graph-based methods fail to simultaneously depict global contextual features and local diverse uni-modal features in a dialogue. Furthermore, with the number of graph layers increasing, they easily fall into over-smoothing. In this paper, we propose a method for joint modality fusion and graph contrastive learning for multimodal emotion recognition (Joyful), where multimodality fusion, contrastive learning, and emotion recognition are jointly optimized. Specifically, we first design a new multimodal fusion mechanism that can provide deep interaction and fusion between the global contextual and uni-modal specific features. Then, we introduce a graph contrastive learning framework with inter- and intra-view contrastive losses to learn more distinguishable representations for samples with different sentiments. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets indicate that Joyful achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared with all baselines. Code is released on Github (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MERC-7F88).

Joyful: Joint Modality Fusion and Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimoda Emotion Recognition

Automatically disentangling an author's style from the content of their writing is a longstanding and possibly insurmountable problem in computational linguistics. At the same time, the availability of large text corpora furnished with author labels has recently enabled learning authorship representations in a purely data-driven manner for authorship attribution, a task that ostensibly depends to a greater extent on encoding writing style than encoding content. However, success on this surrogate task does not ensure that such representations capture writing style since authorship could also be correlated with other latent variables, such as topic.  In an effort to better understand the nature of the information these representations convey, and specifically to validate the hypothesis that they chiefly encode writing style, we systematically probe these representations through a series of targeted experiments. The results of these experiments suggest that representations learned for the surrogate authorship prediction task are indeed sensitive to writing style. As a consequence, authorship representations may be expected to be robust to certain kinds of data shift, such as topic drift over time. Additionally, our findings may open the door to downstream applications that require stylistic representations, such as style transfer.

Can Authorship Representation Learning Capture Stylistic Features?

Current disfluency detection models focus on individual utterances each from a single speaker. However, numerous discontinuity phenomena in spoken conversational transcripts occur across multiple turns, which can not be identified by disfluency detection models. This study addresses these phenomena by proposing an innovative Multi-Turn Cleanup task for spoken conversational transcripts and collecting a new dataset, MultiTurnCleanup. We design a data labeling schema to collect the high-quality dataset and provide extensive data analysis. Furthermore, we leverage two modeling approaches for experimental evaluation as benchmarks for future research.

MultiTurnCleanup: A Benchmark for Multi-Turn Spoken Conversational Transcript Cleanup

Online forums encourage the exchange and discussion of different stances on many topics. Not only do they provide an opportunity to present one's own arguments, but may also gather a broad cross-section of others' arguments. However, the resulting long discussions are difficult to overview. This paper presents a novel unsupervised approach using large language models (LLMs) to generating indicative summaries for long discussions that basically serve as tables of contents. Our approach first clusters argument sentences, generates cluster labels as abstractive summaries, and classifies the generated cluster labels into argumentation frames resulting in a two-level summary. Based on an extensively optimized prompt engineering approach, we evaluate 19 LLMs for generative cluster labeling and frame classification. To evaluate the usefulness of our indicative summaries, we conduct a purpose-driven user study via a new visual interface called **Discussion Explorer**: It shows that our proposed indicative summaries serve as a convenient navigation tool to explore long discussions.

Indicative Summarization of Long Discussions | VIDEO

Multi-document Summarization (MDS) characterizes compressing information from multiple source documents to its succinct summary. An ideal summary should encompass all topics and accurately model cross-document relations expounded upon in the source documents. However, existing systems either impose constraints on the length of tokens during the encoding or falter in capturing the intricate cross-document relationships. These limitations impel the systems to produce summaries that are non-factual and unfaithful, thereby imparting an unfair comprehension of the topic to the readers. To counter these limitations and promote the information equivalence between the source document and generated summary, we propose FIBER, a novel encoder-decoder model that uses pre-trained BART to comprehensively analyze linguistic nuances, simplicial complex layer to apprehend inherent properties that transcend pairwise associations and sheaf graph attention to effectively capture the heterophilic properties. We benchmark FIBER with eleven baselines over four widely-used MDS datasets -- Multinews, CQASumm, DUC and Opinosis, and show that FIBER achieves consistent performance improvement across all the evaluation metrics (syntactical, semantical and faithfulness). We corroborate these improvements further through qualitative human evaluation.

Promoting Topic Coherence and Inter-Document Consorts in Multi-Document Summarization via Simplicial Complex and Sheaf Graph | VIDEO

Biases in the dataset often enable the model to achieve high performance on in-distribution data, while poorly performing on out-of-distribution data. To mitigate the detrimental effect of the bias on the networks, previous works have proposed debiasing methods that down-weight the biased examples identified by an auxiliary model, which is trained with explicit bias labels. However, finding a type of bias in datasets is a costly process. Therefore, recent studies have attempted to make the auxiliary model biased without the guidance (or annotation) of bias labels, by constraining the model's training environment or the capability of the model itself. Despite the promising debiasing results of recent works, the multi-class learning objective, which has been naively used to train the auxiliary model, may harm the bias mitigation effect due to its regularization effect and competitive nature across classes. As an alternative, we propose a new debiasing framework that introduces binary classifiers between the auxiliary model and the main model, coined bias experts. Specifically, each bias expert is trained on a binary classification task derived from the multi-class classification task via the One-vs-Rest approach. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed strategy improves the bias identification ability of the auxiliary model. Consequently, our debiased model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art on various challenge datasets.

Improving Bias Mitigation through Bias Experts in Natural Language Understanding

Differentiable Search Indices (DSIs) encode a corpus of documents in the parameters of a model and use the same model to map queries directly to relevant document identifiers. Despite the solid performance of DSI models, successfully deploying them in scenarios where document corpora change with time is an open problem. In this work, we introduce DSI++, a continual learning challenge for DSI with the goal of continuously indexing new documents while being able to answer queries related to both previously and newly indexed documents. Across different model scales and document identifier representations, we show that continual indexing of new documents leads to considerable forgetting of previously indexed documents. We also hypothesize and verify that the model experiences forgetting events during training, leading to unstable learning. To mitigate these issues, we investigate two approaches. The first focuses on modifying the training dynamics. Flatter minima implicitly alleviates forgetting, so we explicitly optimize for flatter loss basins and show that the model stably memorizes more documents (+12\%).
Next, we introduce a parametric memory to generate pseudo-queries for documents and supplement them during incremental indexing to prevent forgetting for the retrieval task. Extensive experiments on a novel continual indexing benchmark based on Natural Questions demonstrate that our proposed solution mitigates the forgetting in DSI++ by a significant margin and improves the average Hits@10 by +21.1\% over competitive baselines.

DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents | VIDEO

In many Natural Language Processing applications, neural networks have been found to fail to generalize on out-of-distribution examples.
In particular, several recent semantic parsing datasets have put forward important limitations of neural networks in cases where compositional generalization is required.
In this work, we extend a neural graph-based parsing framework in several ways to alleviate this issue, notably:
(1) the introduction of a supertagging step with valency constraints, expressed as an integer linear program;
(2) the reduction of the graph prediction problem to the maximum matching problem;
(3) the design of an incremental early-stopping training strategy to prevent overfitting.
Experimentally, our approach significantly improves results on examples that require structural generalization in the COGS dataset,
a known challenging benchmark for compositional generalization.
Overall, these results confirm that structural constraints are important for generalization in semantic parsing.

Structural generalization in COGS: Supertagging is (almost) all you need | VIDEO

In this paper, we observe and address the challenges of the coordination recognition task. Most existing methods rely on syntactic parsers to identify the coordinators in a sentence and detect the coordination boundaries. However, state-of-the-art syntactic parsers are slow and suffer from errors, especially for long and complicated sentences. To better solve the problems, we propose a pipeline model COordination RECognizer (CoRec). It consists of two components: coordinator identifier and conjunct boundary detector. The experimental results on datasets from various domains demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Further experiments show that CoRec positively impacts downstream tasks, improving the yield of state-of-the-art Open IE models.

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Ditto: A Simple and Efficient Approach to Improve Sentence Embeddings

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Modeling Layout Reading Order as Ordering Relations for Visually-rich Document Understanding

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Ditto: A Simple and Efficient Approach to Improve Sentence Embeddings

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Modeling Layout Reading Order as Ordering Relations for Visually-rich Document Understanding

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads