Singapore

In legal NLP, Case Outcome Classification (COC) must not only be accurate but also trustworthy and explainable. Existing work in explainable COC has been limited to annotations by a single expert. However, it is well-known that lawyers may disagree in their assessment of case facts. We hence collect a novel dataset RaVE: Rationale Variation in ECHR, which is obtained from two experts in the domain of international human rights law, for whom we observe weak agreement. We study their disagreements and build a two-level task-independent taxonomy, supplemented with COC-specific subcategories. To our knowledge, this is the first work in the legal NLP that focuses on human label variation. We quantitatively assess different taxonomy categories and find that disagreements mainly stem from underspecification of the legal context, which poses challenges given the typically limited granularity and noise in COC metadata. We further assess the explainablility of state-of-the-art COC models on RaVE and observe limited agreement between models and experts. Overall, our case study reveals hitherto underappreciated complexities in creating benchmark datasets in legal NLP that revolve around identifying aspects of a case&#39;s facts supposedly relevant for its outcome.

EMNLP 2023

From Dissonance to Insights: Dissecting Disagreements in Rationale Construction for Case Outcome Classification

case outcome classification

pluralistic human value

rationale dataset

human label variation

legal judgement prediction

explainability

disagreement

In legal NLP, Case Outcome Classification (COC) must not only be accurate but also trustworthy and explainable. Existing work in explainable COC has been limited to annotations by a single expert. However, it is well-known that lawyers may disagree in their assessment of case facts. We hence collect a novel dataset RaVE: Rationale Variation in ECHR, which is obtained from two experts in the domain of international human rights law, for whom we observe weak agreement. We study their disagreements and build a two-level task-independent taxonomy, supplemented with COC-specific subcategories. To our knowledge, this is the first work in the legal NLP that focuses on human label variation. We quantitatively assess different taxonomy categories and find that disagreements mainly stem from underspecification of the legal context, which poses challenges given the typically limited granularity and noise in COC metadata. We further assess the explainablility of state-of-the-art COC models on RaVE and observe limited agreement between models and experts. Overall, our case study reveals hitherto underappreciated complexities in creating benchmark datasets in legal NLP that revolve around identifying aspects of a case's facts supposedly relevant for its outcome.

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

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

Surprisal theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) posits that a word’s reading time is proportional to its surprisal (i.e., to its negative log probability given the proceeding context). Since we are unable to access a word’s ground-truth probability, surprisal theory has been empirically tested using surprisal estimates from language models (LMs). Under the premise that surprisal theory holds, we would expect that higher quality language models provide more powerful predictors of human reading behavior---a conjecture we dub the quality--power (QP) hypothesis. Unfortunately, empirical support for the QP hypothesis is mixed. Some studies in English have found correlations between LM quality and predictive power, but other studies using Japanese data, as well as using larger English LMs, find no such correlations. In this work, we conduct a systematic crosslinguistic assessment of the QP hypothesis. We train LMs from scratch on small- and medium-sized datasets from 13 languages (across five language families) and assess their ability to predict eye tracking data. We find correlations between LM quality and power in eleven of these thirteen languages, suggesting that, within the range of model classes and sizes tested, better language models are indeed better predictors of human language processing behaviors.

Language Model Quality Correlates with Psychometric Predictive Power in Multiple Languages

In multilingual translation research, the comprehension and utilization of language families are of paramount importance. Nevertheless, clustering languages based solely on their ancestral families can yield suboptimal results due to variations in the datasets employed during the model's training phase. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce an innovative method that leverages the fisher information matrix (FIM) to cluster language families, anchored on the multilingual translation model's characteristics. We hypothesize that language pairs with similar effects on model parameters exhibit a considerable degree of linguistic congruence and should thus be grouped cohesively. This concept has led us to define pseudo language families. We provide an in-depth discussion regarding the inception and application of these pseudo language families. Empirical evaluations reveal that employing these pseudo language families enhances performance over conventional language families in adapting a multilingual translation model to unfamiliar language pairs. The proposed methodology may also be extended to scenarios requiring language similarity measurements. The source code and associated scripts can be accessed at https://github.com/ecoli-hit/PseudoFamily.

Clustering Pseudo Language Family in Multilingual Translation Models with Fisher Information Matrix

Few-shot relation extraction (FSRE) aims to train a model that can deal with new relations using only a few labeled examples. Most existing studies employ Prototypical Networks for FSRE, which usually overfits the relation classes in the training set and cannot generalize well to unseen relations. By investigating the class separation of an FSRE model, we find that model upper layers are prone to learn relation-specific knowledge. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a HyperNetwork-based Decoupling approach to improve the generalization of FSRE models. Specifically, our model consists of an encoder, a network generator (for producing relation classifiers) and the produced-then-finetuned classifiers for every N-way-K-shot episode. Meanwhile, we design a two-step training framework along with a class-agnostic aligner, in which the generated classifiers focus on acquiring relation-specific knowledge and the encoder is encouraged to learn more general relation knowledge. In this way, the roles of upper and lower layers in an FSRE model are explicitly decoupled, thus enhancing its generalizing capability during testing. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

HyperNetwork-based Decoupling to Improve Model Generalization for Few-Shot Relation Extraction

Recently slot filling has witnessed great development thanks to deep learning and the availability of large-scale annotated data. However, it poses a critical challenge to handle a novel domain whose samples are never seen during training. The recognition performance might be greatly degraded due to severe domain shifts. Most prior works deal with this problem in a two-pass pipeline manner based on metric learning. In practice, these dominant pipeline models may be limited in computational efficiency and generalization capacity because of non-parallel inference and context-free discrete label embeddings. To this end, we re-examine the typical metric-based methods, and propose a new adaptive end-to-end metric learning scheme for the challenging zero-shot slot filling. Considering simplicity, efficiency and generalizability, we present a cascade-style joint learning framework coupled with context-aware soft label representations and slot-level contrastive representation learning to mitigate the data and label shift problems effectively. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over a series of competitive baselines.

Adaptive End-to-End Metric Learning for Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Slot Filling | VIDEO

Online movie review platforms are providing crowdsourced feedback for the film industry and the general public, while spoiler reviews greatly compromise user experience. Although preliminary research efforts were made to automatically identify spoilers, they merely focus on the review content itself, while robust spoiler detection requires putting the review into the context of facts and knowledge regarding movies, user behavior on film review platforms, and more. In light of these challenges, we first curate a large-scale network-based spoiler detection dataset LCS and a comprehensive and up-to-date movie knowledge base UKM. We then propose MVSD, a novel spoiler detection model that takes into account the external knowledge about movies and user activities on movie review platforms. Specifically, MVSD constructs three interconnecting heterogeneous information networks to model diverse data sources and their multi-view attributes, while we design and employ a novel heterogeneous graph neural network architecture for spoiler detection as node-level classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MVSD advances the state-of-the-art on two spoiler detection datasets, while the introduction of external knowledge and user interactions help ground robust spoiler detection.

Detecting Spoilers in Movie Reviews with External Movie Knowledge and User Networks

Temporal Logic (TL) can be used to rigorously specify complex high-level specification for systems in many engineering applications. The translation between natural language (NL) and TL has been under-explored due to the lack of dataset and generalizable model across different application domains. In this paper, we propose an accurate and generalizable transformation framework of English instructions from NL to TL, exploring the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) at multiple stages. Our contributions are twofold. First, we develop a framework to create a dataset of NL-TL pairs combining LLMs and human annotation. We publish a dataset with 23K NL-TL pairs. Then, we finetune T5 models on the lifted versions (i.e., the specific Atomic Propositions (AP) are hidden) of the NL and TL. The enhanced generalizability originates from two aspects: 1) Usage of lifted NL-TL characterizes common logical structures, without constraints of specific domains. 2) Application of LLMs in dataset creation largely enhances corpus richness. We test the generalization of trained models on five varied domains. To achieve full NL-TL transformation, we either combine the lifted model with AP recognition task or do the further finetuning on each specific domain. During the further finetuning, our model achieves higher accuracy (> 95%) using only <10% training data, compared with the baseline sequence to sequence (Seq2Seq) model.

NL2TL: Transforming Natural Languages to Temporal Logics using Large Language Models | VIDEO

Given the exponential growth in the number of documents on the web in recent years, there is an increasing demand for accurate models to extract keyphrases from such documents. Keyphrase extraction is the task of automatically identifying representative keyphrases from the source document. Typically, candidate keyphrases exhibit latent hierarchical structures embedded with intricate syntactic and semantic information. Moreover, the relationships between candidate keyphrases and the document also form hierarchical structures. Therefore, it is essential to consider these latent hierarchical structures when extracting keyphrases. However, many recent unsupervised keyphrase extraction models overlook this aspect, resulting in incorrect keyphrase extraction. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a new hyperbolic ranking model (HyperRank). HyperRank is designed to jointly model global and local context information for estimating the importance of each candidate keyphrase within the hyperbolic space, enabling accurate keyphrase extraction. Experimental results demonstrate that HyperRank significantly outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines.

HyperRank: Hyperbolic Ranking Model for Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction

Planning is an important capability of artificial agents that perform long-horizon tasks in real-world environments. In this work, we explore the use of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to reason about plan sequences from text instructions in embodied visual environments. Prior PLM based approaches for planning either assume observations are available in the form of text by a captioning model, reason about plans from the instruction alone, or incorporate information about the visual environment in limited ways (such as a pre-trained affordance function). In contrast, we show that the PLM can accurately plan even when observations are directly encoded as input prompts for the PLM. We show this simple approach outperforms prior approaches in experiments on the ALFWorld and VirtualHome benchmarks.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Language Models Plan from Pixels | VIDEO

We explore how we can build accurate world models, which are partially specified by language, and how we can plan with them in the face of novelty and uncertainty. We propose the first model-based reinforcement learning approach to tackle the environment Read To Fight Monsters (Zhong et al., 2019), a grounded policy learning problem. In RTFM an agent has to reason over a set of rules and a goal, both described in a language manual, and the observations, while taking into account the uncertainty arising from the stochasticity of the environment, in order to generalize successfully its policy to test episodes. We demonstrate the superior performance and sample efficiency of our model-based approach to the existing model-free SOTA agents in eight variants of RTFM. Furthermore, we show how the agent's plans can be inspected, which represents progress towards more interpretable agents.

Reader: Model-based language-instructed reinforcement learning | VIDEO

With the rise of social media and online communication, the issue of cyberbullying has gained significant prominence. While extensive research is being conducted to develop more effective models for detecting cyberbullying in monolingual languages, a significant gap exists in understanding code-mixed languages and the need for explainability in this context. To address this gap, we have introduced a novel benchmark dataset named BullyExplain for explainable cyberbullying detection in code-mixed language. In this dataset, each post is meticulously annotated with four labels: bully, sentiment, target, and rationales, indicating the specific phrases responsible for identifying the post as a bully. Our current research presents an innovative unified generative framework, GenEx, which reimagines the multitask problem as a text-to-text generation task. Our proposed approach demonstrates its superiority across various evaluation metrics when applied to the BullyExplain dataset, surpassing other baseline models and current state-of-the-art approaches.

From Dissonance to Insights: Dissecting Disagreements in Rationale Construction for Case Outcome Classification

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Language Model Quality Correlates with Psychometric Predictive Power in Multiple Languages

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From Dissonance to Insights: Dissecting Disagreements in Rationale Construction for Case Outcome Classification

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Language Model Quality Correlates with Psychometric Predictive Power in Multiple Languages

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads