Singapore

The theory of Conceptual Spaces is an influential cognitive-linguistic framework for representing the meaning of concepts. Conceptual spaces are constructed from a set of quality dimensions, which essentially correspond to primitive perceptual features (e.g. hue or size). These quality dimensions are usually learned from human judgements, which means that applications of conceptual spaces tend to be limited to narrow domains (e.g. modelling colour or taste). Encouraged by recent findings about the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to learn perceptually grounded representations, we explore the potential of such models for learning conceptual spaces. Our experiments show that LLMs can indeed be used for learning meaningful representations to some extent. However, we also find that fine-tuned models of the BERT family are able to match or even outperform the largest GPT-3 model, despite being 2 to 3 orders of magnitude smaller.

EMNLP 2023

Cabbage Sweeter than Cake? Analysing the Potential of Large Language Models for Learning Conceptual Spaces | VIDEO

conceptual spaces

large language models

knowledge representation

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

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.

We present Superlim, a multi-task NLP benchmark and analysis platform for evaluating Swedish language models, a counterpart to the English-language (Super)GLUE suite. We describe the dataset, the tasks, the leaderboard and report the baseline results yielded by a reference implementation. The tested models do not approach ceiling performance on any of the tasks, which suggests that Superlim is truly difficult, a desirable quality for a benchmark. We address methodological challenges, such as mitigating the Anglocentric bias when creating datasets for a less-resourced language; choosing the most appropriate measures; documenting the datasets and making the leaderboard convenient and transparent. We also highlight other potential usages of the dataset, such as, for instance, the evaluation of cross-lingual transfer learning.

Superlim: A Swedish Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark

Maintaining a consistent persona is a key quality for any open domain dialogue system. Current state-of-the-art systems do this by training agents with supervised learning or online reinforcement learning (RL). However, systems trained with supervised learning often lack consistency as they are never punished for uttering contradictions. Additional training with RL can alleviate some of these issues, however the training process is expensive. Instead, we propose an offline RL framework to improve the persona consistency of dialogue systems. Our framework allows us to combine the advantages of previous methods as we can inexpensively train our model on existing data as in supervised learning, while punishing and rewarding specific utterances as in RL. We also introduce a simple importance sampling method to reduce the variance of importance weights in offline RL training which we call Variance-Reducing MLE-Initialized (VaRMI) importance sampling. Our automatic and human evaluations show that our framework improves both the persona consistency and dialogue quality of a state-of-the-art social chatbot.

Building Persona Consistent Dialogue Agents with Offline Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we focus on editing multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs). Compared to editing single-modal LLMs, multimodal model editing is more challenging, which demands a higher level of scrutiny and careful consideration in the editing process. To facilitate research in this area, we construct a new benchmark, dubbed MMEdit, for editing multimodal LLMs and establishing a suite of innovative metrics for evaluation. We conduct comprehensive experiments involving various model editing baselines and analyze the impact of editing different components for multimodal LLMs. Empirically, we notice that previous baselines can implement editing multimodal LLMs to some extent, but the effect is still barely satisfactory, indicating the potential difficulty of this task. We hope that our work can provide the NLP community with insights.

Can We Edit Multimodal Large Language Models? | VIDEO

Recent Language Models (LMs) have shown impressive capabilities in generating texts with the knowledge internalized in parameters. Yet, LMs often generate the factually incorrect responses to the given queries, since their knowledge may be inaccurate, incomplete, and outdated. To address this problem, previous works propose to augment LMs with the knowledge retrieved from an external knowledge source. However, such approaches often show suboptimal text generation performance due to two reasons: 1) the model may fail to retrieve the knowledge relevant to the given query, or 2) the model may not faithfully reflect the retrieved knowledge in the generated text. To overcome these, we propose to verify the output and the knowledge of the knowledge-augmented LMs with a separate verifier, which is a small LM that is trained to detect those two types of errors through instruction-finetuning. Then, when the verifier recognizes an error, we can rectify it by either retrieving new knowledge or generating new text. Further, we use an ensemble of the outputs from different instructions with a single verifier to enhance the reliability of the verification processes. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed verification steps on multiple question answering benchmarks, whose results show that the proposed verifier effectively identifies retrieval and generation errors, allowing LMs to provide more factually correct outputs. Our code is available at https://github.com/JinheonBaek/KALMV.

Knowledge-Augmented Language Model Verification

Developing an efficient retriever to retrieve knowledge from a large-scale knowledge base (KB) is critical for task-oriented dialogue systems to effectively handle localized and specialized tasks. However, widely used generative models such as T5 and ChatGPT often struggle to differentiate subtle differences among the retrieved KB records when generating responses, resulting in suboptimal quality of generated responses. In this paper, we propose the application of maximal marginal likelihood to train a perceptive retriever by utilizing signals from response generation for supervision. In addition, our approach goes beyond considering solely retrieved entities and incorporates various meta knowledge to guide the generator, thus improving the utilization of knowledge. We evaluate our approach on three task-oriented dialogue datasets using T5 and ChatGPT as the backbone models. The results demonstrate that when combined with meta knowledge, the response generator can effectively leverage high-quality knowledge records from the retriever and enhance the quality of generated responses. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/shenwzh3/MK-TOD.

Retrieval-Generation Alignment for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue System | VIDEO

Modern systems for multi-hop question answering (QA) typically break questions into a sequence of reasoning steps, termed chain-of-thought (CoT), before arriving at a final answer. Often, multiple chains are sampled and aggregated through a voting mechanism over the final answers, but the intermediate steps themselves are discarded. While such approaches improve performance, they do not consider the relations between intermediate steps across chains and do not provide a unified explanation for the predicted answer. We introduce Multi-Chain Reasoning (MCR), an approach which prompts large language models to meta-reason over multiple chains of thought, rather than aggregate their answers. MCR examines different reasoning chains, mixes information between them and selects the most relevant facts in generating an explanation and predicting the answer. MCR outperforms strong baselines on 7 multi-hop QA datasets. Moreover, our analysis reveals that MCR explanations exhibit high quality, enabling humans to verify its answers.

Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought

In the financial domain, conducting entity-level sentiment analysis is crucial for accurately assessing the sentiment directed toward a specific financial entity. To our knowledge, no publicly available dataset currently exists for this purpose. In this work, we introduce an entity-level sentiment classification dataset, called FinEntity, that annotates financial entity spans and their sentiment (positive, neutral, and negative) in financial news. We document the dataset construction process in the paper. Additionally, we benchmark several pre-trained models (BERT, FinBERT, etc.) and ChatGPT on entity-level sentiment classification. In a case study, we demonstrate the practical utility of using FinEntity in monitoring cryptocurrency markets. The data and code of FinEntity is available at https://github.com/yixuantt/FinEntity.

FinEntity: Entity-level Sentiment Classification for Financial Texts

The CoNLL-03 corpus is arguably the most well-known and utilized benchmark dataset for named entity recognition (NER). However, prior works found significant numbers of annotation errors, incompleteness, and inconsistencies in the data. This poses challenges to objectively comparing NER approaches and analyzing their errors, as current state-of-the-art models achieve F1-scores that are comparable to or even exceed the estimated noise level in CoNLL-03. To address this issue, we present a comprehensive relabeling effort assisted by automatic consistency checking that corrects 7.0% of all labels in the English CoNLL-03. Our effort adds a layer of entity linking annotation both for better explainability of NER labels and as additional safeguard of annotation quality. Our experimental evaluation finds not only that state-of-the-art approaches reach significantly higher F1-scores (97.1%) on our data, but crucially that the share of correct predictions falsely counted as errors due to annotation noise drops from 47% to 6%. This indicates that our resource is well suited to analyze the remaining errors made by state-of-the-art models, and that the theoretical upper bound even on high resource, coarse-grained NER is not yet reached.
To facilitate such analysis, we make CleanCoNLL publicly available to the research community.

CleanCoNLL: A Nearly Noise-Free Named Entity Recognition Dataset

Question answering plays a pivotal role in human daily life because it involves our acquisition of knowledge about the world. However, due to the dynamic and ever-changing nature of real-world facts, the answer can be completely different when the time constraint in the question changes. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable intelligence in question answering, while our experiments reveal that the aforementioned problems still pose a significant challenge to existing LLMs. This can be attributed to the LLMs' inability to perform rigorous reasoning based on surface-level text semantics. To overcome this limitation, rather than requiring LLMs to directly answer the question, we propose a novel approach where we reframe the $\textbf{Q}$uestion $\textbf{A}$nswering task $\textbf{a}$s $\textbf{P}$rogramming ($\textbf{QAaP}$). Concretely, by leveraging modern LLMs' superior capability in understanding both natural language and programming language, we endeavor to harness LLMs to represent diversely expressed text as well-structured code and select the best matching answer from multiple candidates through programming. We evaluate our QAaP framework on several time-sensitive question answering datasets and achieve decent improvement, up to $14.5$% over strong baselines.

Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions | VIDEO

Relation extraction is a crucial task in natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR). Previous work on event relation extraction mainly focuses on hierarchical, temporal and causal relations. Such relationships consider two events to be independent in terms of syntax and semantics, but they fail to recognize the interdependence between events. To bridge this gap, we introduce a human-annotated Event Dependency Relation dataset (EDeR). The annotation is done on a sample of documents from the OntoNotes dataset, which has the additional benefit that it integrates with existing, orthogonal, annotations of this dataset. We investigate baseline approaches for EDeR's event dependency relation prediction. We show that recognizing such event dependency relations can further benefit critical NLP tasks, including semantic role labelling and co-reference resolution.

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Superlim: A Swedish Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark

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