Singapore

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.

EMNLP 2023

Learning to Paraphrase Sentences to Different Complexity Levels

same-level paraphrasing

sentence complexification

prompt learning

sentence simplification

paraphrasing

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.

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}.

Non-Autoregressive Document-Level Machine Translation

Multiple defendants in a criminal fact description generally exhibit complex interactions, and cannot be well handled by existing Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) methods which focus on predicting judgment results (e.g., law articles, charges, and terms of penalty) for single-defendant cases. To address this problem, we propose the task of multi-defendant LJP, which aims to automatically predict the judgment results for each defendant of multi-defendant cases. Two challenges arise with the task of multi-defendant LJP: (1) indistinguishable judgment results among various defendants; and (2) the lack of a real-world dataset for training and evaluation. To tackle the first challenge, we formalize the multi-defendant judgment process as hierarchical reasoning chains and introduce a multi-defendant LJP method, named Hierarchical Reasoning Network (HRN), which follows the hierarchical reasoning chains to determine criminal relationships, sentencing circumstances, law articles, charges, and terms of penalty for each defendant. To tackle the second challenge, we collect a real-world multi-defendant LJP dataset, namely MultiLJP, to accelerate the relevant research in the future. Extensive experiments on MultiLJP verify the effectiveness of our proposed HRN.

Multi-Defendant Legal Judgment Prediction via Hierarchical Reasoning

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) generates translation while reading the whole source sentence. However, existing SiMT models are typically trained using the same reference disregarding the varying amounts of available source information at different latency. Training the model with ground-truth at low latency may introduce forced anticipations, whereas utilizing reference consistent with the source word order at high latency results in performance degradation. Consequently, it is crucial to train the SiMT model with appropriate reference that avoids forced anticipations during training while maintaining high quality. In this paper, we propose a novel method that provides tailored reference for the SiMT models trained at different latency by rephrasing the ground-truth. Specifically, we introduce the tailor, induced by reinforcement learning, to modify ground-truth to the tailored reference. The SiMT model is trained with the tailored reference and jointly optimized with the tailor to enhance performance. Importantly, our method is applicable to a wide range of current SiMT approaches. Experiments on three translation tasks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both fixed and adaptive policies.

Simultaneous Machine Translation with Tailored Reference

As information extraction (IE) systems have grown more adept at processing whole documents, the classic task of *template filling* has seen renewed interest as a benchmark for document-level IE. In this position paper, we call into question the suitability of template filling for this purpose. We argue that the task demands definitive answers to thorny questions of *event individuation* — the problem of distinguishing distinct events — about which even human experts disagree. Through an annotation study and error analysis, we show that this raises concerns about the usefulness of template filling metrics, the quality of datasets for the task, and the ability of models to learn it. Finally, we consider possible solutions.

Learning to Paraphrase Sentences to Different Complexity Levels

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

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