Singapore

Recent work in NLP has shown promising results in training models on large amounts of tasks to achieve better generalization. However, it is not well-understood how tasks are related, and how helpful training tasks can be chosen for a new task. In this work, we investigate whether knowing task relationships via pairwise task transfer improves choosing one or more source tasks that help to learn a new target task. We provide TaskWeb, a large-scale benchmark of pairwise task transfers for 22 NLP tasks using three different model types, sizes, and adaptation methods, spanning about 25,000 experiments. Then, we design a new method TaskShop based on our analysis of TaskWeb. TaskShop uses TaskWeb to estimate the benefit of using a source task for learning a new target task, and to choose a subset of helpful training tasks for multi-task training. Our method improves overall rankings and top-k precision of source tasks by 10% and 38%, respectively. We also use TaskShop to build much smaller multi-task training sets that improve zero-shot performances across 11 different target tasks by at least 4.3%.

EMNLP 2023

TaskWeb: Selecting Better Source Tasks for Multi-task NLP

task transfer

task selection

multi-task learning

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.

Modern NLP models are often trained over large untrusted datasets, raising the potential for a malicious adversary to compromise model
behaviour. For instance, backdoors can be implanted through crafting training instances with a specific textual trigger and a target label. This paper posits that backdoor poisoning attacks exhibit a spurious correlation between simple text features and classification labels, and accordingly, proposes methods for mitigating spurious correlation as means of defence. Our empirical study reveals that the malicious triggers are highly correlated to their target labels; therefore such correlations are extremely distinguishable compared to those scores of benign features, and can be used to filter out potentially problematic instances. Compared with several existing defences, our defence method significantly reduces attack success rates across backdoor attacks, and in the case of insertion-based attacks, our method provides a near-perfect defence.

Mitigating Backdoor Poisoning Attacks through the Lens of Spurious Correlation | VIDEO

The emerging paradigm of generative retrieval re-frames the classic information retrieval problem into a sequence-to-sequence modeling task, forgoing external indices and encoding an entire document corpus within a single Transformer.
Although many different approaches have been proposed to improve the effectiveness of generative retrieval, they have only been evaluated on document corpora on the order of 100K in size.
We conduct the first empirical study of generative retrieval techniques across various corpus scales, ultimately scaling up to the entire MS MARCO passage ranking task with a corpus of 8.8M passages and evaluating model sizes up to 11B parameters.
We uncover several findings about scaling generative retrieval to millions of passages; notably, the central importance of using synthetic queries as document representations during indexing, the ineffectiveness of existing proposed architecture modifications when accounting for compute cost, and the limits of naively scaling model parameters with respect to retrieval performance.
While we find that generative retrieval is competitive with state-of-the-art dual encoders on small corpora, scaling to millions of passages remains an important and unsolved challenge.
We believe these findings will be valuable for the community to clarify the current state of generative retrieval, highlight the unique challenges, and inspire new research directions.

How Does Generative Retrieval Scale to Millions of Passages? | VIDEO

Prompting language models (LMs) is the main interface for applying them to new tasks. However, for smaller LMs, prompting provides low accuracy compared to gradient-based fine-tuning. Tree Prompting is an approach to prompting which builds a decision tree of prompts, linking multiple prompt-LM calls together to solve a task. At inference time, each call to the LM is determined by efficiently routing the outcome of the previous call using the tree. Experiments on classification datasets show that Tree Prompting improves accuracy over competing methods and is competitive with fine-tuning. We also show that variants of Tree Prompting allow inspection of a model's decision-making process.

Tree Prompting: Efficient Task Adaptation without Fine-Tuning

Multilingual information retrieval (MLIR) is a crucial yet challenging task due to the need for human annotations in multiple languages, making training data creation labor-intensive. 
In this paper, we introduce mAggretriever, which effectively leverages semantic and lexical features from pre-trained multilingual transformers (e.g., mBERT and XLM-R) for dense retrieval. 
To enhance training and inference efficiency, we employ approximate masked-language modeling prediction for computing lexical features, reducing 70--85\% GPU memory requirement for mAggretriever fine-tuning. 
Empirical results demonstrate that mAggretriever, fine-tuned solely on English training data, surpasses existing state-of-the-art multilingual dense retrieval models that undergo further training on large-scale MLIR training data.
Our code is available at url.

mAggretriever: A Simple yet Effective Approach to Zero-Shot Multilingual Dense Retrieval | VIDEO

In this paper we improve the zero-shot generalization ability of language models via Mixture-Of-Memory Augmentation (MoMA), a mechanism that retrieves augmentation documents from multiple information corpora (external memories), with the option to ''plug in'' unseen memory at inference time.
We develop a joint learning mechanism that trains the augmentation component with latent labels derived from the end retrieval task, paired with hard negatives from the memory mixture.
We instantiate the model in a zero-shot dense retrieval setting by augmenting strong T5-based retrievers with MoMA.
With only T5-base, our model obtains strong zero-shot retrieval accuracy on the eighteen tasks included in the standard BEIR benchmark, outperforming some systems with larger model sizes.
As a plug-in-play model, our model can efficiently generalize to any unseen corpus, meanwhile achieving comparable or even better performance than methods relying on target-specific pretraining.
Our analysis further illustrates the necessity of augmenting with mixture-of-memory for robust generalization, the benefits of augmentation learning, and how MoMA utilizes the plug-in memory at inference time without changing its parameters.
Our code can be found at https://github.com/gesy17/MoMA.

Augmenting Zero-Shot Dense Retrievers with Plug-in Mixture-of-Memories | VIDEO

Record linkage is a bedrock of quantitative social science, as analyses often require linking data from multiple, noisy sources. Off-the-shelf string matching methods are widely used, as they are straightforward and cheap to implement and scale. Not all character substitutions are equally probable, and for some settings there are widely used handcrafted lists denoting which string substitutions are more likely, that improve the accuracy of string matching. However, such lists do not exist for many settings, skewing research with linked datasets towards a few high-resource contexts that are not representative of the diversity of human societies. This study develops an extensible way to measure character substitution costs for OCR'ed documents, by employing large-scale self-supervised training of vision transformers (ViT) with augmented digital fonts. For each language written with the CJK script, we contrastively learn a metric space where different augmentations of the same character are represented nearby. In this space, homoglyphic characters - those with similar appearance such as "O" and "0" - have similar vector representations. Using the cosine distance between characters' representations as the substitution cost in an edit distance matching algorithm significantly improves record linkage compared to other widely used string matching methods, as OCR errors tend to be homoglyphic in nature. Homoglyphs can plausibly capture character visual similarity across any script, including low-resource settings. We illustrate this by creating homoglyph sets for 3,000 year old ancient Chinese characters, which are highly pictorial. Fascinatingly, a ViT is able to capture relationships in how different abstract concepts were conceptualized by ancient societies, that have been noted in the archaeological literature.

Quantifying Character Similarity with Vision Transformers | VIDEO

In Chinese studies, understanding the nuanced traits of historical figures, often not explicitly evident in biographical data, has been a key interest. 
However, identifying these traits can be challenging due to the need for domain expertise, specialist knowledge, and context-specific insights, making the process time-consuming and difficult to scale. 
Our focus on studying officials from China's Ming Dynasty is no exception.
To tackle this challenge, we propose MingOfficial, a large-scale multi-modal dataset consisting of both structured (career records, annotated personnel types) and text (historical texts) data for $9,376$ officials.
We further couple the dataset with a a graph neural network (GNN) to combine both modalities in order to allow investigation of social structures and provide features to boost down-stream tasks.
Experiments show that our proposed MingOfficial could enable exploratory analysis of official identities, and also significantly boost performance in tasks such as identifying nuance identities (e.g.\ civil officials holding military power) from $24.6\%$ to $98.2\%$ F$_1$ score in hold-out test set. By making MingOfficial publicly available (see main text for the URL) as both a dataset and an interactive tool, we aim to stimulate further research into the role of social context and representation learning in identifying individual characteristics, and hope to provide inspiration for computational approaches in other fields beyond Chinese studies.

MingOfficial: A Ming Official Career Dataset and a Historical Context-Aware Representation Learning Framework | VIDEO

Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KEPLMs) improve the performance of various downstream NLP tasks by injecting knowledge facts from large-scale Knowledge Graphs (KGs). However, existing methods for pre-training KEPLMs with relational triples are difficult to be adapted to close domains due to the lack of sufficient domain graph semantics. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-enhanced language representation learning framework for various closed domains (KANGAROO) via capturing the implicit graph structure among the entities. Specifically, since the entity coverage rates of closed-domain KGs can be relatively low and may exhibit the global sparsity phenomenon for knowledge injection, we consider not only the shallow relational representations of triples but also the hyperbolic embeddings of deep hierarchical entity-class structures for effective knowledge fusion. Moreover, as two closed-domain entities under the same entity-class often havel locally dense neighbor subgraphs counted by max point biconnected component, we further propose a data augmentation strategy based on contrastive learning over subgraphs to construct hard negative samples of higher quality. It makes the underlying KELPMs better distinguish the semantics of these neighboring entities to further complement the global semantic sparsity. In the experiments, we evaluate KANGAROO over various knowledge-aware and general NLP tasks in both full and few-shot learning settings, outperforming various KEPLM training paradigms performance in closed-domains significantly.

Learning Knowledge-Enhanced Contextual Language Representations for Domain Natural Language Understanding

The growing concerns and regulations surrounding the protection of user data privacy have necessitated decentralized training paradigms. To this end, federated learning (FL) is widely studied in user-related natural language processing (NLP). However, it suffers from several critical limitations including extensive communication overhead, inability to handle heterogeneity, and vulnerability to white-box inference attacks. Federated distillation (FD) is proposed to alleviate these limitations, but its performance is faded by confirmation bias. To tackle this issue, we propose Federated Interactive Distillation (FedID), which utilizes a small amount of labeled data retained by the server to further rectify the local models during knowledge transfer. Additionally, based on the GLUE benchmark, we develop a benchmarking framework across multiple tasks with diverse data distributions to contribute to the research of FD in NLP community. Experiments show that our proposed FedID framework achieves the best results in homogeneous and heterogeneous federated scenarios. The code for this paper is available at: https://github.com/maxinge8698/FedID.

FedID: Federated Interactive Distillation for Large-Scale Pretraining Language Models

Language features are evolving in real-world social media, resulting in the deteriorating performance of text classification in dynamics. To address this challenge, we study temporal adaptation, where models trained on past data are tested in the future. Most prior work focused on continued pretraining or knowledge updating, which may compromise their performance on noisy social media data. To tackle this issue, we reflect feature change via modeling latent topic evolution and propose a novel model, VIBE: Variational Information Bottleneck for Evolutions. Concretely, we first employ two Information Bottleneck (IB) regularizers to distinguish past and future topics. Then, the distinguished topics work as adaptive features via multi-task training with timestamp and class label prediction. In adaptive learning, VIBE utilizes retrieved unlabeled data from online streams created posterior to training data time. Substantial Twitter experiments on three classification tasks show that our model, with only 3% of data, significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art continued-pretraining methods.

TaskWeb: Selecting Better Source Tasks for Multi-task NLP

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Mitigating Backdoor Poisoning Attacks through the Lens of Spurious Correlation | VIDEO

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