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If you ask a human to describe an image, they might do so in a thousand different ways. Traditionally, image captioning models are trained to generate a single &quot;best&quot; (most like a reference) image caption. Unfortunately, doing so encourages captions that are &quot;informationally impoverished,&quot; and focus on only a subset of the possible details, while ignoring other potentially useful information in the scene. In this work, we introduce a simple, yet novel, method: &quot;Image Captioning by Committee Consensus&quot; (IC3), designed to generate a single caption that captures high-level details from several annotator viewpoints. Humans rate captions produced by IC3 at least as helpful as baseline SOTA models more than two thirds of the time, and IC3 can improve the performance of SOTA automated recall systems by up to 84%, outperforming single human-generated reference captions, and indicating significant improvements over SOTA approaches for visual description. Code is available at [https://davidmchan.github.io/caption-by-committee/](https://davidmchan.github.io/caption-by-committee/)

EMNLP 2023

IC3: Image Captioning by Committee Consensus

language model

image captioning

summarization

If you ask a human to describe an image, they might do so in a thousand different ways. Traditionally, image captioning models are trained to generate a single "best" (most like a reference) image caption. Unfortunately, doing so encourages captions that are "informationally impoverished," and focus on only a subset of the possible details, while ignoring other potentially useful information in the scene. In this work, we introduce a simple, yet novel, method: "Image Captioning by Committee Consensus" (IC3), designed to generate a single caption that captures high-level details from several annotator viewpoints. Humans rate captions produced by IC3 at least as helpful as baseline SOTA models more than two thirds of the time, and IC3 can improve the performance of SOTA automated recall systems by up to 84%, outperforming single human-generated reference captions, and indicating significant improvements over SOTA approaches for visual description. Code is available at [https://davidmchan.github.io/caption-by-committee/](https://davidmchan.github.io/caption-by-committee/)

poster

**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.

Recent research at the intersection of AI explainability and fairness has focused on how explanations can improve human-plus-AI task performance as assessed by fairness measures. We propose to characterize what constitutes an explanation that is itself "fair" -- an explanation that does not adversely impact specific populations. We formulate a novel evaluation method of "fair explanations" using not just accuracy and label time, but also psychological impact of explanations on different user groups across many metrics (mental discomfort, stereotype activation, and perceived workload). We apply this method in the context of content moderation of potential hate speech, and its differential impact on Asian vs. non-Asian proxy moderators, across explanation approaches (saliency map and counterfactual explanation). We find that saliency maps generally perform better and show less evidence of disparate impact (group) and individual unfairness than counterfactual explanations.

Content warning: This paper contains examples of hate speech and racially discriminatory language. The authors do not support such content. Please consider your risk of discomfort carefully before continuing reading!

Towards Conceptualization of “Fair Explanation”: Disparate Impacts of anti-Asian Hate Speech Explanations on Content Moderators

Inference, especially those derived from inductive processes, is a crucial component in our conversation to complement the information implicitly or explicitly conveyed by a speaker. 
While recent large language models show remarkable advances in inference tasks, their performance in inductive reasoning, where not all information is present in the context, is far behind deductive reasoning. 
In this paper, we analyze the behavior of the models based on the task difficulty defined by the semantic information gap -- which distinguishes inductive and deductive reasoning. 
Our analysis reveals that the information gap between dialogue contexts and desired inferences renders the inductive inference process more challenging. 
To mitigate this information gap, we investigate a contrastive learning approach by feeding negative samples.
Our experiments suggest negative samples help models understand what is wrong and improve their inference generations.

Contrastive Learning for Inference in Dialogue | VIDEO

Despite the striking advances in recent language generation performance, model-generated responses have suffered from the chronic problem of hallucinations that are either untrue or unfaithful to a given source. Especially in the task of knowledge grounded conversation, the models are required to generate informative responses, but hallucinated utterances lead to miscommunication. In particular, entity-level hallucination that causes critical misinformation and undesirable conversation is one of the major concerns. To address this issue, we propose a post-hoc refinement method called REM. It aims to enhance the quality and faithfulness of hallucinated utterances by refining them based on the source knowledge. If the generated utterance has a low source-faithfulness score with the given knowledge, REM mines the key entities in the knowledge and implicitly uses them for refining the utterances. We verify that our method reduces entity hallucination in the utterance. Also, we show the adaptability and efficacy of REM with extensive experiments and generative results. Our code is available at https://github.com/YOONNAJANG/REM.

Post-hoc Utterance Refining Method by Entity Mining for Faithful Knowledge Grounded Conversations | VIDEO

Representation learning forms an essential building block in the development of natural language processing architectures. To date, mainstream approaches focus on learning textual information at the sentence- or document-level, unfortunately, overlooking the inter-document connections. This omission decreases the potency of downstream applications, particularly in multi-document settings. To address this issue, embeddings equipped with latent semantic and rich relatedness information are needed. In this paper, we propose SMRC$^{2}$, which extends representation learning to the multi-document level. Our model jointly learns latent semantic information from content and rich relatedness information from topological networks. Unlike previous studies, our work takes multi-document as input and integrates both semantic and relatedness information using a shared space via language model and graph structure. Our extensive experiments confirm the superiority and effectiveness of our approach. To encourage further research in scientific multi-literature representation learning, we will release our code and a new dataset from the biomedical domain.

Content- and Topology-Aware Representation Learning for Scientific Multi-Literature

Language models (LMs) gradually become general-purpose interfaces in the interactive and embodied world, where the understanding of physical concepts is an essential prerequisite.
However, it is unclear whether LMs can understand physical concepts in the human world. 
To investigate this, we design a benchmark VEC that covers the tasks of (i) Visual concepts, such as the shape and material of objects, and (ii) Embodied Concepts, learned from the interaction with the world such as the temperature of objects. 
Our zero (few)-shot prompting results show that
the understanding of certain visual concepts
emerges as scaling up LMs, but there are still
basic concepts to which the scaling law does not apply.
For example, OPT-175B performs close to humans with a zero-shot accuracy of $85$\% on the material concept, yet behaves like random guessing on the mass concept.
Instead, vision-augmented LMs such as CLIP and BLIP achieve a human-level understanding of embodied concepts.
Analysis indicates that the rich semantics in visual representation can serve as a valuable source of embodied knowledge. Inspired by this, we propose a distillation method to transfer embodied knowledge from VLMs to LMs, achieving performance gain comparable with that by scaling up parameters of LMs $134\times$. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/TobiasLee/VEC.

Can Language Models Understand Physical Concepts?

The usage of exocentric and egocentric videos in Video Question Answering (VQA) is a new endeavor in human-robot interaction and collaboration studies. Particularly for egocentric videos, one may leverage eye-gaze information to understand human intentions during the task. In this paper, we build a novel task-oriented VQA dataset, called GazeVQA, for collaborative tasks where gaze information is captured during the task process. GazeVQA is designed with a novel QA format that covers thirteen different reasoning types to capture multiple aspects of task information and user intent. For each participant, GazeVQA consists of more than 1,100 textual questions and more than 500 labeled images that were annotated with the assistance of the Segment Anything Model. In total, 2,967 video clips, 12,491 labeled images, and 25,040 questions from 22 participants were included in the dataset. Additionally, inspired by the assisting models and common ground theory for industrial task collaboration, we propose a new AI model called AssistGaze that is designed to answer the questions with three different answer types, namely textual, image, and video. AssistGaze can effectively ground the perceptual input into semantic information while reducing ambiguities. We conduct comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the challenges of GazeVQA and the effectiveness of AssistGaze.

GazeVQA: A Video Question Answering Dataset for Multiview Eye-Gaze Task-Oriented Collaborations

Continual Named Entity Recognition (CNER) is a burgeoning area, which involves updating an existing model by incorporating new entity types sequentially. Nevertheless, continual learning approaches are often severely afflicted by catastrophic forgetting. This issue is intensified in CNER due to the consolidation of old entity types from previous steps into the non-entity type at each step, leading to what is known as the semantic shift problem of the non-entity type. In this paper, we introduce a pooled feature distillation loss that skillfully navigates the trade-off between retaining knowledge of old entity types and acquiring new ones, thereby more effectively mitigating the problem of catastrophic forgetting. Additionally, we develop a confidence-based pseudo-labeling for the non-entity type, i.e., predicting entity types using the old model to handle the semantic shift of the non-entity type. Following the pseudo-labeling process, we suggest an adaptive re-weighting type-balanced learning strategy to handle the issue of biased type distribution. We carried out comprehensive experiments on ten CNER settings using three different datasets. The results illustrate that our method significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches, registering an average improvement of 6.3% and 8.0% in Micro and Macro F1 scores, respectively.

Continual Named Entity Recognition without Catastrophic Forgetting | VIDEO

Math word problems (MWP) involving advanced operators such as linear equation solver cannot be easily tackled by earlier MWP methods, because the existing generation methods suffer from repeated sub-expression generation and deductive methods are restricted to dealing with binary operations. This paper propose a new multivariate directed acyclic graph (mDAG) as an alternative to the generation methods' binary expression tree or the deductive methods' binary directed acyclic graph. Then to produce the topological ordering of mDAG, we propose a generation-based deductive (GeDe) model, which equips a generation model with a re-encoder to keep the deductive property but avoid the expensive enumeration of the deductive methods. GeDe performs well on math problems with many operators on the widely used benchmarks as well as solving multivariate operators on our own CMWPA benchmark. Our code is available at https://github.com/hyx1999/GeDe

A Generation-based Deductive Method for Math Word Problems

Algorithmic sequence alignment identifies similar segments shared between pairs of documents, and is fundamental to many NLP tasks.
But it is difficult to recognize similarities between distant versions of narratives such as translations and retellings, particularly for summaries and abridgements which are much shorter than the original novels.

We develop a general approach to narrative alignment coupling the Smith-Waterman algorithm from bioinformatics with modern text similarity metrics. We show that the background of alignment scores fits a Gumbel distribution, enabling us to define rigorous p-values on the significance of any alignment. We apply and evaluate our general narrative alignment tool (GNAT) on four distinct problem domains differing greatly in both the relative and absolute length of documents, namely summary-to-book alignment, translated book alignment, short story alignment, and plagiarism detection---demonstrating the power and performance of our methods.

GNAT: A General Narrative Alignment Tool

Novels are often adapted into feature films, but the differences between the two media usually require dropping sections of the source text from the movie script. Here we study this screen adaptation process by constructing narrative alignments using the Smith-Waterman local alignment algorithm coupled with SBERT embedding distance to quantify text similarity between scenes and book units. We use these alignments to perform an automated analysis of 40 adaptations, revealing insights into the screenwriting process concerning (i) faithfulness of adaptation, (ii) importance of dialog, (iii) preservation of narrative order, and (iv) gender representation issues reflective of the Bechdel test.

IC3: Image Captioning by Committee Consensus

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Towards Conceptualization of “Fair Explanation”: Disparate Impacts of anti-Asian Hate Speech Explanations on Content Moderators

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