Singapore

Recently, there has been a notable surge in the significance of large language models (LLMs) that engage in conversational-style interactions, such as ChatGPT and Claude, as they contribute significantly to the progress of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Typically, these models undergo a two-phase fine-tuning process: instruction fine-tuning (IF) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). These methods aim to align the LLMs to be helpful, honest, and harmless (HHH). However, RLHF, which incorporates independent reward models trained on high-quality human feedback datasets, incurs high costs in terms of hardware resources and human efforts. Therefore, we explore the possibility of aligning LLMs with their own understanding of HHH through IF and in-context learning (ICL). In this study, we propose a novel framework called Self-Criticism, which allows LLMs to align themselves with HHH based on the definition they learned from a large-scale text corpus. We begin by employing IF on a given instruction set and learning HHH discrimination through few-shot ICL. Subsequently, the LLMs evaluate their own generated responses and learn to produce ``better&#39;&#39; responses based on self-judgment. Finally, the model is retrained based on the self-generated responses to distill the whole process. By analyzing our proposed method, we also find interesting connections between Self-Criticism and goal-conditioned reinforcement learning, and pseudo-labeling. Experimental results demonstrate that this method achieves nearly identical performance to RLHF in terms of both human evaluation and evaluation by other LLMs, with only a minimal alignment tax.

EMNLP 2023

Self-Criticism: Aligning Large Language Models with their Understanding of Helpfulness, Honesty, and Harmlessness

supervised fine-tuning

instruction fine-tuning

large language models

Recently, there has been a notable surge in the significance of large language models (LLMs) that engage in conversational-style interactions, such as ChatGPT and Claude, as they contribute significantly to the progress of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Typically, these models undergo a two-phase fine-tuning process: instruction fine-tuning (IF) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). These methods aim to align the LLMs to be helpful, honest, and harmless (HHH). However, RLHF, which incorporates independent reward models trained on high-quality human feedback datasets, incurs high costs in terms of hardware resources and human efforts. Therefore, we explore the possibility of aligning LLMs with their own understanding of HHH through IF and in-context learning (ICL). In this study, we propose a novel framework called Self-Criticism, which allows LLMs to align themselves with HHH based on the definition they learned from a large-scale text corpus. We begin by employing IF on a given instruction set and learning HHH discrimination through few-shot ICL. Subsequently, the LLMs evaluate their own generated responses and learn to produce ``better'' responses based on self-judgment. Finally, the model is retrained based on the self-generated responses to distill the whole process. By analyzing our proposed method, we also find interesting connections between Self-Criticism and goal-conditioned reinforcement learning, and pseudo-labeling. Experimental results demonstrate that this method achieves nearly identical performance to RLHF in terms of both human evaluation and evaluation by other LLMs, with only a minimal alignment tax.

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.

With the continuous emergence of Chinese Large Language Models (LLMs), how to evaluate a model's capabilities has become an increasingly significant issue. The absence of a comprehensive Chinese benchmark that thoroughly assesses a model's performance, the unstandardized and incomparable prompting procedure, and the prevalent risk of contamination pose major challenges in the current evaluation of Chinese LLMs. We present CLEVA, a user-friendly platform crafted to holistically evaluate Chinese LLMs. Our platform employs a standardized workflow to assess LLMs' performance across various dimensions, regularly updating a competitive leaderboard. To alleviate contamination, CLEVA curates a significant proportion of new data and develops a sampling strategy that guarantees a unique subset for each leaderboard round. Empowered by an easy-to-use interface that requires just a few mouse clicks and a model API, users can conduct a thorough evaluation with minimal coding. Large-scale experiments featuring 23 Chinese LLMs have validated CLEVA's efficacy.

CLEVA: Chinese Language Models EVAluation Platform

Evidently, words can have multiple senses. For example, the word mess refers to a place to have food or to a confusing situation. How exactly multiple senses emerge is less clear. In this work, we propose and analyze a mathematical model of the evolution of lexical meaning to investigate mechanisms leading to polysemy. 

This model features factors that have been discussed to impact the semantic processing and transmission of words: word frequency, non-conformism, and semantic discriminability. We formally derive conditions under which a sense of a word tends to diversify itself into multiple senses that coexist stably.

The model predicts that diversification is promoted by low frequency, a strong bias for non-conformist usage, and high semantic discriminability. We statistically validate these predictions with historical language data covering semantic developments of a set of English words. Multiple alternative measures are used to operationalize each variable involved, and we confirm the predicted tendencies for twelve combinations of measures.

Seeing through the mess: evolutionary dynamics of lexical polysemy | VIDEO

Recently, post-processing networks (PPNs), which modify the outputs of arbitrary modules including non-differentiable ones in task-oriented dialogue systems, have been proposed. PPNs have successfully improved the dialogue performance by post-processing natural language understanding (NLU), dialogue state tracking (DST), and dialogue policy (Policy) modules with a classification-based approach. However, they cannot be applied to natural language generation (NLG) modules because the post-processing of the utterance output by the NLG module requires a generative approach. In this study, we propose a new post-processing component for NLG, generative post-processing networks (GenPPNs). For optimizing GenPPNs via reinforcement learning, the reward function incorporates dialogue act contribution, a new measure to evaluate the contribution of GenPPN-generated utterances with regard to task completion in dialogue. Through simulation and human evaluation experiments based on the MultiWOZ dataset, we confirmed that GenPPNs improve the task completion performance of task-oriented dialogue systems.

Enhancing Task-oriented Dialogue Systems with Generative Post-processing Networks | VIDEO

Recent advancements in natural language processing by large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have been suggested to approach Artificial General Intelligence. And yet, it is still under dispute whether LLMs possess similar reasoning abilities to humans. This study evaluates GPT-4 and various other LLMs in judging the profoundness of mundane, motivational, and pseudo-profound statements. We found a significant statement-to-statement correlation between the LLMs and humans, irrespective of the type of statements and the prompting technique used. However, LLMs systematically overestimate the profoundness of nonsensical statements, with the exception of Tk-instruct, which uniquely underestimates the profoundness of statements. Only few-shot learning prompts, as opposed to chain-of-thought prompting, draw LLMs ratings closer to humans. Furthermore, this work provides insights into the potential biases induced by Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), inducing an increase in the bias to overestimate the profoundness of statements.

Large Language Models are biased to overestimate profoundness

Multi-Modal Entity Alignment (MMEA) is a critical task that aims to identify equivalent entity pairs across multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs). However, this task faces challenges due to the presence of different types of information, including neighboring entities, multi-modal attributes, and entity types. Directly incorporating the above information (e.g., concatenation or attention) can lead to an unaligned information space. To address these challenges, we propose a novel MMEA transformer, called Meaformer, that hierarchically introduces neighbor features, multi-modal attributes, and entity types to enhance the alignment task. Taking advantage of the transformer's ability to better integrate multiple information, we design a hierarchical modifiable self-attention block in a transformer encoder to preserve the unique semantics of different information. Furthermore, we design two entity-type prefix injection methods to redintegrate entity-type information using type prefixes, which help to restrict the global information of entities not present in the MMKGs.

Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph Transformer Framework for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment

In comparative linguistics, colexification refers to the phenomenon of a lexical form conveying two or more distinct meanings. Existing work on colexification patterns relies on annotated word lists, limiting scalability and usefulness in NLP. In contrast, we identify colexification patterns of more than 2,000 concepts across 1,335 languages directly from an unannotated parallel corpus. We then propose simple and effective methods to build multilingual graphs from the colexification patterns: \textbf{ColexNet} and \textbf{ColexNet+}. ColexNet's nodes are concepts and its edges are colexifications. In ColexNet+, concept nodes are additionally linked through intermediate nodes, each representing an ngram in one of 1,334 languages. We use ColexNet+ to train $\overrightarrow{\mbox{ColexNet+}}$, high-quality multilingual embeddings that are well-suited for transfer learning. In our experiments, we first show that ColexNet achieves high recall on CLICS, a dataset of crosslingual colexifications. We then evaluate $\overrightarrow{\mbox{ColexNet+}}$ on roundtrip translation, sentence retrieval and sentence classification and show that our embeddings surpass several transfer learning baselines. This demonstrates the benefits of using colexification as a source of information in multilingual NLP.

Crosslingual Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Languages Based on Multilingual Colexification Graphs

Medical claim coding is the process of transforming medical records, usually presented as free texts written by clinicians, or discharge summaries, into structured codes in a classification system such as ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision) or DRG (Diagnosis-Related Group) codes. This process is essential for medical billing and transitional care; however, manual coding is time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive. To solve these issues, we propose DRGCoder, an explainability-enhanced clinical claim coding system for the early prediction of medical severity DRGs (MS-DRGs), a classification system that categorizes patients' hospital stays into various DRG groups based on the severity of illness and mortality risk. The DRGCoder framework introduces a novel multi-task Transformer model for MS-DRG prediction, modeling both the DRG labels of the discharge summaries and the important, or salient words within he discharge summaries. We allow users to inspect DRGCoder's reasoning by visualizing the weights for each word of the input. Additionally, DRGCoder allows users to identify diseases within discharge summaries and compare across multiple discharge summaries. Our demo is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/danielhajialigol/DRGCoder. A video demonstrating the demo can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcdiG6VwqlA

DRGCoder: Explainable Clinical Coding for the Early Prediction of Diagnostic-Related Groups

In this paper, we introduce CAMRA (Copilot for AMR Annotatations), a cutting-edge web-based tool designed for constructing Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) from natural language text. CAMRA offers a novel approach to deep lexical semantics annotation such as AMR, treating AMR annotation akin to coding in programming languages. Leveraging the familiarity of programming paradigms, CAMRA encompasses all essential features of existing AMR editors, including example lookup, while going a step further by integrating Propbank roleset lookup as an autocomplete feature within the tool. Notably, CAMRA incorporates AMR parser models as coding co-pilots, greatly enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of AMR annotators.

CAMRA: Copilot for AMR Annotation | VIDEO

Chemical reactions, as a core entity in the realm of chemistry, hold crucial implications in diverse areas ranging from hands-on laboratory research to advanced computational drug design. Despite a burgeoning interest in employing NLP techniques to extract these reactions, aligning this task with the real-world requirements of chemistry practitioners remains an ongoing challenge. In this paper, we present Reaction Miner, a system specifically designed to interact with raw scientific literature, delivering precise and more informative chemical reactions. Going beyond mere extraction, Reaction Miner integrates a holistic workflow: it accepts PDF files as input, bypassing the need for pre-processing and bolstering user accessibility. Subsequently, a text segmentation module ensures that the refined text encapsulates complete chemical reactions, augmenting the accuracy of extraction. Moreover, Reaction Miner broadens the scope of existing pre-defined reaction roles, including vital attributes previously neglected, thereby offering a more comprehensive depiction of chemical reactions. Evaluations conducted by chemistry domain users highlight the efficacy of each module in our system, demonstrating Reaction Miner as a powerful tool in this field.

Reaction Miner: An Integrated System for Chemical Reaction Extraction from Textual Data

Large language models (LLMs) enable system builders today to create competent NLP systems through prompting, where they only need to describe the task in natural language and provide a few examples. However, in other ways, LLMs are a step backward from traditional special-purpose NLP models; they require extensive computational resources for deployment and can be gated behind APIs. In this paper, we propose Prompt2Model, a general-purpose method that takes a natural language task description like the prompts provided to LLMs, and uses it to train a special-purpose model that is conducive to deployment. This is done through a multi-step process of retrieval of existing datasets and pretrained models, dataset generation using LLMs, and supervised fine-tuning on these retrieved and generated datasets. Over three tasks, we demonstrate that given the same few-shot prompt as input, Prompt2Model trains models that outperform the results of a strong LLM, gpt-3.5-turbo, by an average of 20% while being up to 700 times smaller. We also show that this data can be used to obtain reliable performance estimates of model performance, enabling model developers to assess model reliability before deployment. Prompt2Model is available open-source at https://github.com/neulab/prompt2model. Our demo video is posted at youtu.be/LYYQ_EhGd-Q.

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Self-Criticism: Aligning Large Language Models with their Understanding of Helpfulness, Honesty, and Harmlessness

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