Singapore

Representational spaces learned via language modeling are fundamental to Natural Language Processing (NLP), however there has been limited understanding regarding how and when during training various types of linguistic information emerge and interact. Leveraging a novel information theoretic probing suite, which enables direct comparisons of not just task performance, but their representational subspaces, we analyze nine tasks covering syntax, semantics and reasoning, across 2M pre-training steps and five seeds. We identify critical learning phases across tasks and time, during which subspaces emerge, share information, and later disentangle to specialize. Across these phases, syntactic knowledge is acquired rapidly after 0.5% of full training. Continued performance improvements primarily stem from the acquisition of open-domain knowledge, while semantics and reasoning tasks benefit from later boosts to long-range contextualization and higher specialization. Measuring cross-task similarity further reveals that linguistically related tasks share information throughout training, and do so more during the critical phase of learning than before or after. Our findings have implications for model interpretability, multi-task learning, and learning from limited data.

EMNLP 2023

Subspace Chronicles: How Linguistic Information Emerges, Shifts and Interacts during Language Model Training

artificial intelligence

representation learning

machine learning

language modeling

interpretability

natural language processing

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.

In this paper, we investigate automatic detection of subtle semantic shifts between social communities of different political convictions in Dutch and English. We perform a methodological study comparing methods using static and contextualized language models. We investigate the impact of specializing contextualized models through fine-tuning on target corpora, word sense disambiguation and sentiment. We furthermore propose a new approach using masked token prediction, that relies on behavioral information, specifically the most probable substitutions, instead of geometrical comparison of representations. Our results show that methods using static models and our masked token prediction method can detect differences in connotation of politically loaded terms, whereas methods that rely on measuring the distance between contextualized representations are not providing clear signals, even in synthetic scenarios of extreme shifts.

Methodological Insights in Detecting Subtle Semantic Shifts with Contextualized and Static Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have generated considerable interest and debate regarding their potential emergence of Theory of Mind (ToM). Several recent inquiries reveal a lack of robust ToM in these models and pose a pressing demand to develop new benchmarks, as current ones primarily focus on different aspects of ToM and are prone to shortcuts and data leakage. In this position paper, we seek to answer two road-blocking questions: (1) How can we taxonomize a holistic landscape of machine ToM? (2) What is a more effective evaluation protocol for machine ToM? Following psychological studies, we taxonomize machine ToM into 7 mental state categories and delineate existing benchmarks to identify under-explored aspects of ToM. We argue for a holistic and situated evaluation of ToM to break ToM into individual components and treat LLMs as an agent who is physically situated in environments and socially situated in interactions with humans. Such situated evaluation provides a more comprehensive assessment of mental states and potentially mitigates the risk of shortcuts and data leakage. We further present a pilot study in a grid world setup as a proof of concept. We hope this position paper can facilitate future research to integrate ToM with LLMs and offer an intuitive means for researchers to better position their work in the landscape of ToM.

Towards A Holistic Landscape of Situated Theory of Mind in Large Language Models

We present Dolphin, a novel benchmark that addresses the need for a natural language generation (NLG) evaluation framework dedicated to the wide collection of Arabic languages and varieties. The proposed benchmark encompasses a broad range of 13 different NLG tasks, including dialogue generation, question answering, machine translation, summarization, among others. Dolphin comprises a substantial corpus of 40 diverse and representative public datasets across 50 test splits, carefully curated to reflect real-world scenarios and the linguistic richness of Arabic. It sets a new standard for evaluating the performance and generalization capabilities of Arabic and multilingual models, promising to enable researchers to push the boundaries of current methodologies. We provide an extensive analysis of Dolphin, highlighting its diversity and identifying gaps in current Arabic NLG research. We also offer a public leaderboard that is both interactive and modular and evaluate several Arabic and multilingual models on our benchmark, allowing us to set strong baselines against which researchers can compare.

Dolphin: A Challenging and Diverse Benchmark for Arabic NLG

Large language models (LLMs) can perform a wide range of tasks by following natural language instructions, without the necessity of task-specific fine-tuning. Unfortunately, the performance of LLMs is greatly influenced by the quality of these instructions, and manually writing effective instructions for each task is a laborious and subjective process. In this paper, we introduce Auto-Instruct, a novel method to automatically improve the quality of instructions provided to LLMs. Our method leverages the inherent generative ability of LLMs to produce diverse candidate instructions for a given task, and then ranks them using a scoring model trained on a variety of 575 existing NLP tasks. In experiments on 118 out-of-domain tasks, Auto-Instruct surpasses both human-written instructions and existing baselines of LLM-generated instructions. Furthermore, our method exhibits notable generalizability even with other LLMs that are not incorporated into its training process.

Auto-Instruct: Automatic Instruction Generation and Ranking for Black-Box Language Models

Personalized Headline Generation aims to generate unique headlines tailored to users' browsing history. In this task, understanding user preferences from click history and incorporating them into headline generation pose challenges. Existing approaches typically rely on predefined styles as control codes, but personal style lacks explicit definition or enumeration, making it difficult to leverage traditional techniques. To tackle these challenges, we propose General Then Personal (GTP), a novel framework comprising user modeling, headline generation, and customization. We train the framework using tailored designs that emphasize two central ideas: (a) task decoupling and (b) model pre-training. With the decoupling mechanism separating the task into generation and customization, two mechanisms, i.e., information self-boosting and mask user modeling, are further introduced to facilitate the training and text control. Additionally, we introduce a new evaluation metric to address existing limitations. Extensive experiments conducted on the PENS dataset, considering both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios, demonstrate that GTP outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, ablation studies and analysis emphasize the significance of decoupling and pre-training. Finally, the human evaluation validates the effectiveness of our approaches.

General then Personal: Decoupling and Pre-training for Personalized Headline Generation | VIDEO

Key information extraction (KIE) from scanned documents has gained increasing attention because of its applications in various domains. Although promising results have been achieved by some recent KIE approaches, they are usually built based on discriminative models, which lack the ability to handle optical character recognition (OCR) errors and require laborious token-level labeling. In this paper, we propose a novel generative end-to-end model, named GenKIE, to address the KIE task. GenKIE is a sequence-to-sequence multimodal generative model that utilizes multimodal encoders to embed visual, layout and textual features and a decoder to generate the desired output. Well-designed prompts are leveraged to incorporate the label semantics as the weakly supervised signals and entice the generation of the key information. One notable advantage of the generative model is that it enables automatic correction of OCR errors. Besides, token-level granular annotation is not required. Extensive experiments on multiple public real-world datasets show that GenKIE effectively generalizes over different types of documents and achieves state-of-the-art results. Our experiments also validate the model's robustness against OCR errors, making GenKIE highly applicable in real-world scenarios.

GenKIE: Robust Generative Multimodal Document Key Information Extraction

Albeit Natural Language Processing has seen major breakthroughs in the last few years, transferring such advances into real-world business cases can be challenging. One of the reasons resides in the displacement between popular benchmarks and actual data. Lack of supervision, unbalanced classes, noisy data and long documents often affect real problems in vertical domains such as finance, law and health. To support industry-oriented research, we present BUSTER, a BUSiness Transaction Entity Recognition dataset. The dataset consists of 3779 manually annotated documents on financial transactions. We establish several baselines exploiting both general-purpose and domain-specific language models. The best performing model is also used to automatically annotate 6196 documents, which we release as an additional silver corpus to BUSTER.

BUSTER: a "BUSiness Transaction Entity Recognition" dataset

Given the fact description text of a legal case, legal judgment prediction (LJP) aims to predict the case's charge, applicable law article, and term of penalty. A core problem of LJP is distinguishing confusing legal cases where only subtle text differences exist. Previous studies fail to distinguish different classification errors with a standard cross-entropy classification loss and ignore the numbers in the fact description for predicting the term of penalty. To tackle these issues, in this work, first, in order to exploit the numbers in legal cases for predicting the term of penalty of certain charges, we enhance the representation of the fact description with extracted crime amounts which are encoded by a pre-trained numeracy model. Second, we propose a moco-based supervised contrastive learning to learn distinguishable representations and explore the best strategy to construct positive example pairs to benefit all three subtasks of LJP simultaneously. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results, particularly for confusing legal cases. Ablation studies also demonstrate the effectiveness of each component.

Exploiting Contrastive Learning and Numerical Evidence for Confusing Legal Judgment Prediction

Large language models have recently risen in popularity due to their ability to perform many natural language tasks without requiring any fine-tuning. In this work, we focus on two novel ideas: (1) generating definitions from examples and using them for zero-shot classification, and (2) investigating how an LLM makes use of the definitions. We thoroughly analyze the performance of GPT-3 model for fine-grained multi-label conspiracy theory classification of tweets using zero-shot labeling. In doing so, we asses how to improve the labeling by providing minimal but meaningful context in the form of the definitions of the labels. We compare descriptive noun phrases, human-crafted definitions, introduce a new method to help the model generate definitions from examples, and propose a method to evaluate GPT-3's understanding of the definitions. We demonstrate that improving definitions of class labels has a direct consequence on the downstream classification results.

Definitions Matter: Guiding GPT for Multi-label Classification

How do we evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) and determine the aspects and limits of their intelligent behaviour?

It is currently conjectured that shortcomings of LLMs in multi-linguality and reasoning are due to a lack of ability to generalize.
It has been argued that, instead, humans are better at generalization because they have a tendency at extracting rules from complex data. 
We propose a method to evaluate LLMs ability to rule-based generalization.

When exposed to tests of analytic intelligence, for example the visual RAVEN IQ test, human problem-solvers identify the relevant objects in the picture and their relevant attributes and reason based on rules applied to them. Based on the induced rules, they are able to provide a generalisation and a solution to the test.

An analogous language task has recently been proposed (called BLM) for LLM. 
In this paper, we argue that we can use this task to investigate what linguistic reasoning LLM develop, by asking them to solve some simple variants of the BLM task.

We find that current state-of-the-art generative models, such as ChatGPT, can handle the task in the sense that they easily understand the instructions and can provide step-by-step reasoning that shows that it can solve two of the main cognitive hurdles: correspondence finding (object and attribute identification) and item novelty. However, overall they cannot find the correct answer, even with considerable help. In particular, they never identify the structure of the problem, exhibiting, we hypothesize, a lack of goal and subgoal management abilities, an ability that has been argued to measure differential abilities in humans. 

We argue that this finding supports the usefulness of the task as a method to test the limits and specific properties of generalisation ability in Large Language Models, providing an intrinsic evaluation method inspired by tests of human intelligence.

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Subspace Chronicles: How Linguistic Information Emerges, Shifts and Interacts during Language Model Training

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Methodological Insights in Detecting Subtle Semantic Shifts with Contextualized and Static Language Models

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