Singapore

In behavioural testing, system functionalities underrepresented in the standard evaluation setting (with a held-out test set) are validated through controlled input-output pairs. Optimising performance on the behavioural tests during training (behavioural learning) would improve coverage of phenomena not sufficiently represented in the i.i.d. data and could lead to seemingly more robust models. However, there is the risk that the model narrowly captures spurious correlations from the behavioural test suite, leading to overestimation and misrepresentation of model performanceone of the original pitfalls of traditional evaluation. In this work, we introduce BeLUGA, an analysis method for evaluating behavioural learning considering generalisation across dimensions of different granularity levels. We optimise behaviour-specific loss functions and evaluate models on several partitions of the behavioural test suite controlled to leave out specific phenomena. An aggregate score measures generalisation to unseen functionalities (or overfitting). We use BeLUGA to examine three representative NLP tasks (sentiment analysis, paraphrase identification and reading comprehension) and compare the impact of a diverse set of regularisation and domain generalisation methods on generalisation performance.

EMNLP 2023

Cross-functional Analysis of Generalisation in Behavioural Learning | VIDEO

behavioral learning

behavioral testing

paraphrase identification

reading comprehension

sentiment analysis

generalization

evaluation

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.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for automatic summarization but the reasons behind their successes are poorly understood. By conducting a human evaluation on ten LLMs across different pretraining methods, prompts, and model scales, we make two important observations. First, we find instruction tuning, and not model size, is the key to the LLM's zero-shot summarization capability. Second, existing studies have been limited by low-quality references, leading to underestimates of human performance and lower few-shot and finetuning performance. To better evaluate LLMs, we perform human evaluation over high-quality summaries we collect from freelance writers. Despite major stylistic differences such as the amount of paraphrasing, we find that LMM summaries are judged to be on par with human written summaries.

Benchmarking Large Language Models for News Summarization

The recognition of dataset names is a critical task for automatic information extraction in scientific literature, enabling researchers to understand and identify research opportunities. However, existing corpora for dataset mention detection are limited in size and naming diversity. In this paper, we introduce the Dataset Mentions Detection Dataset (DMDD), the largest publicly available corpus for this task. DMDD consists of the DMDD main corpus, comprising 31,219 scientific articles with over 449,000 dataset mentions weakly annotated in the format of in-text spans, and an evaluation set, which comprises of 450 scientific articles manually annotated for evaluation purposes. We use DMDD to establish baseline performance for dataset mention detection and linking. By analyzing the performance of various models on DMDD, we are able to identify open problems in dataset mention detection. We invite the community to use our dataset as a challenge to develop novel dataset mention detection models.

DMDD: A Large-Scale Dataset for Dataset Mentions Detection

While sentence simplification is an active research topic in NLP, its adjacent tasks of sentence complexification and same-level paraphrasing are not. To train models on all three tasks, we present two new unsupervised datasets. We compare these datasets, one labeled by a weak classifier and the other by a rule-based approach, with a single supervised dataset. Using these three datasets for training, we perform extensive experiments on both multitasking and prompting strategies. Compared to other systems trained on unsupervised parallel data, models trained on our weak classifier labeled dataset achieve state-of-the-art performance on the ASSET simplification benchmark.

Learning to Paraphrase Sentences to Different Complexity Levels

Africa has a very low doctor-to-patient ratio. At very busy clinics, doctors could see 30+ patients per day-- a heavy patient burden compared with developed countries-- but productivity tools such as clinical automatic speech recognition (ASR) are lacking for these overworked clinicians. However, clinical ASR is mature, even ubiquitous, in developed nations, and clinician-reported performance of commercial clinical ASR systems is generally satisfactory. Furthermore, the recent performance of general domain ASR is approaching human accuracy. However, several gaps exist. Several publications have highlighted racial bias with speech-to-text algorithms and performance on minority accents lags significantly. To our knowledge, there is no publicly available research or benchmark on accented African clinical ASR, and speech data is non-existent for the majority of African accents. We release AfriSpeech, 200hrs of Pan-African English speech, 67,577 clips from 2,463 unique speakers across 120 indigenous accents from 13 countries for clinical and general domain ASR, a benchmark test set, with publicly available pre-trained models with SOTA performance on the AfriSpeech benchmark.

AfriSpeech-200: Pan-African Accented Speech Dataset for Clinical and General Domain ASR

Self-supervised sentence representation learning is the task of constructing an embedding space for sentences without relying on human annotation efforts. One straightforward approach is to finetune a pretrained language model (PLM) with a representation learning method such as contrastive learning. While this approach achieves impressive performance on larger PLMs, the performance rapidly degrades as the number of parameters decreases. In this paper, we propose a framework called Self-supervised Cross-View Training (SCT) to narrow the performance gap between large and small PLMs. To evaluate the effectiveness of SCT, we compare it to 5 baseline and state-of-the-art competitors on seven Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmarks using 5 PLMs with the number of parameters ranging from 4M to 340M. The experimental results show that STC outperforms the competitors for PLMs with less than 100M parameters in 18 of 21 cases.\n 

An Efficient Self-Supervised Cross-View Training For Sentence Embedding

Pretrained natural language processing(NLP) models have achieved high overall performance, but they still make systematic errors. Instead of manual error analysis, research on slice detection models (SDM), which automatically identify underperforming groups of datapoints, has caught escalated&nbsp;attention in Computer Vision for both&nbsp;understanding model behaviors and providing&nbsp;insights for future model training and designing. However, little research on SDM and quantitative evaluation of their effectiveness&nbsp;have been conducted on NLP tasks. Our paper fills the gap by proposing a&nbsp;benchmark named Discover, Explain, Improve (DEIM) for classification NLP tasks&nbsp;along with a new SDM Edisa. Edisadiscovers coherent and underperforming groups&nbsp;of datapoints; DEIM then unites them under human-understandable concepts and&nbsp;provides comprehensive evaluation tasks&nbsp;and corresponding quantitative metrics. The evaluation in DEIM shows that Edisa can accurately select error-prone datapoints with informative semantic features that&nbsp;summarize error patterns. Detecting difficult datapoints directly boosts model performance&nbsp;without tuning any original model&nbsp;parameters, showing that discovered slices are actionable for users.

Discover, Explain, Improve: An Automatic Slice Detection Benchmark for Natural Language Processing

Automated fact-checking systems verify claims against evidence to predict their veracity. In real-world scenarios, the retrieved evidence may not unambiguously support or refute the claim and yield conflicting but valid interpretations. Existing fact-checking datasets assume that the models developed with them predict a single veracity label for each claim, thus discouraging the handling of such ambiguity. To address this issue we present AmbiFC, a fact-checking dataset with 10k claims derived from real-world information needs. It contains fine-grained evidence annotations of 50k passages from 5k Wikipedia pages. We analyze the disagreements arising from ambiguity when comparing claims against evidence in AmbiFC, observing a strong correlation of annotator disagreement with linguistic phenomena such as underspecification and probabilistic reasoning. We develop models for predicting veracity handling this ambiguity via soft labels and find that a pipeline that learns the label distribution for sentence-level evidence selection and veracity prediction yields the best performance. We compare models trained on different subsets of AmbiFC and show that models trained on the ambiguous instances perform better when faced with the identified linguistic phenomena.

AmbiFC: Fact-Checking Ambiguous Claims with Evidence | VIDEO

Creating high-quality annotated data for task-oriented dialog (ToD) is known to be notoriously difficult, and the challenges are amplified when the goal is to create equitable, culturally adapted, and large-scale ToD datasets for multiple languages. Therefore, the current datasets are still very scarce and suffer from limitations such as translation-based non-native dialogs with translation artefacts, small scale, or lack of cultural adaptation, among others. In this work, we first take stock of the current landscape of multilingual ToD datasets, offering a systematic overview of their properties and limitations. Aiming to reduce all the detected limitations, we then introduce Multi3WOZ, a novel multilingual, multi-domain, multi-parallel ToD dataset. It is large-scale and offers culturally adapted dialogs in 4 languages to enable training and evaluation of multilingual and cross-lingual ToD systems. We describe a complex bottom-up data collection process that yielded the final dataset, and offer the first sets of baseline scores across different ToD-related tasks for future reference, also highlighting its challenging nature.

Multi3WOZ: A Multilingual, Multi-Domain, Multi-Parallel Dataset for Training and Evaluating Culturally Adapted Task-Oriented Dialog Systems | VIDEO

Cross-domain Relation Extraction aims to transfer knowledge from a source domain to a different target domain to address low-resource challenges. However, the semantic gap caused by data bias between domains is a major challenge, especially in few-shot scenarios.
Previous work has mainly focused on transferring knowledge between domains through shared feature representations without analyzing the impact of each factor that may produce data bias based on the characteristics of each domain.
This work takes a causal perspective and proposes a new framework CausalGF.
By constructing a unified structural causal model, we estimating the causal effects of factors such as syntactic structure, label distribution,and entities on the outcome.
CausalGF calculates the causal effects among the factors and adjusts them dynamically based on domain characteristics, enabling adaptive gap filling.
Our experiments show that our approach better fills the domain gap, yielding significantly better results on the cross-domain few-shot relation extraction task.

Always the Best Fit: Adaptive Domain Gap Filling from Causal Perspective for Few-Shot Relation Extraction

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models achieve comparable performance and superior speed compared to auto-regressive translation (AT) models in the context of sentence-level machine translation (MT). However, their abilities are unexplored in document-level MT, hindering their usage in real scenarios. 
In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive examination of typical NAT models in the context of document-level MT and further propose a simple but effective design of sentence alignment between source and target.
Experiments show that NAT models achieve high acceleration on documents, and sentence alignment significantly enhances their performance. 

However, current NAT models still have a significant performance gap compared to their AT counterparts. Further investigation reveals that NAT models suffer more from the multi-modality and misalignment issues in the context of document-level MT, and current NAT models struggle with exploiting document context and handling discourse phenomena.
We delve into these challenges and provide our code at \url{https://github.com/baoguangsheng/nat-on-doc}.

Cross-functional Analysis of Generalisation in Behavioural Learning | VIDEO

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Benchmarking Large Language Models for News Summarization

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Cross-functional Analysis of Generalisation in Behavioural Learning | VIDEO

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Benchmarking Large Language Models for News Summarization

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads