Singapore

This paper studies how to effectively build
meeting summarization systems for real-world
usage using large language models (LLMs).
For this purpose, we conduct an extensive evaluation
and comparison of various closed-source
and open-source LLMs, namely, GPT-4, GPT-
3.5, PaLM-2, and LLaMA-2. Our findings reveal
that most closed-source LLMs are generally
better in terms of performance. However,
much smaller open-source models like LLaMA-
2 (7B and 13B) could still achieve performance
comparable to the large closed-source models
even in zero-shot scenarios. Considering the
privacy concerns of closed-source models for
only being accessible via API, alongside the
high cost associated with using fine-tuned versions
of the closed-source models, the opensource
models that can achieve competitive performance
are more advantageous for industrial
use. Balancing performance with associated
costs and privacy concerns, the LLaMA-2-7B
model looks more promising for industrial usage.
In sum, this paper offers practical insights
on using LLMs for real-world business meeting
summarization, shedding light on the trade-offs
between performance and cost.

EMNLP 2023

Building Real-World Meeting Summarization Systems using Large Language Models: A Practical Perspective

large language model

summarization

zero-shot learning

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
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Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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.

Existing accent transfer works rely on parallel data or speech recognition models. This paper focuses on the practical application of accent transfer and aims to implement accent transfer using non-parallel datasets. The study has encountered the challenge of speech representation disentanglement and modeling accents. In our accent modeling transfer framework, we manage to solve these problems by two proposed methods. First, we learn the suprasegmental information associated with tone to finely model the accents in terms of tone and rhythm. Second, we propose to use mutual information learning to disentangle the accent features and control the accent of the generated speech during the inference time. Experiments show that the proposed framework attains superior performance to the baseline models in terms of accentedness and audio quality.

Non-parallel Accent Transfer based on Fine-grained Controllable Accent Modelling

In Psychotherapy, {maladaptive schemas}-- negative perceptions that {an 
individual has of the self, others, or the world that endure despite objective reality}--
often lead to resistance to treatments and relapse of mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, panic attacks etc. Identification of early maladaptive schemas (EMS) is thus a crucial 
step during Schema Therapy-based counseling sessions, 
where patients 
go through a detailed and lengthy EMS questionnaire. However, such an approach is not practical in "offline" counseling scenarios, such as community QA forums which are gaining popularity for people seeking mental health support. In this paper, we 
investigate both LLM (Large Language Models) and non-LLM approaches for identifying EMS labels using resources from Schema Therapy. 
Our evaluation indicates that 
recent LLMs can be effective for identifying EMS but their predictions lack explainability and are too sensitive to precise `prompts'. 
Both LLM and non-LLM methods are unable to reliably address the {null} cases, i.e. cases with no EMS labels. However, we posit that the two approaches show complementary properties and together, 
they can be used to further devise techniques
for EMS identification.

Identifying {Early Maladaptive Schemas} from Mental Health Question Texts

Text simplification has emerged as an increasingly useful application of AI for bridging the communication gap in specialized fields such as medicine, where the lexicon is often dominated by technical jargon and complex constructs. Despite notable progress, methods in medical simplification sometimes result in the generated text having lower quality and diversity. In this work, we explore ways to further improve the readability of text simplification in the medical domain. We propose (1) a new unlikelihood loss that encourages generation of simpler terms and (2) a reranked beam search decoding method that optimizes for simplicity, which achieve better performance on readability metrics on three datasets. This study's findings offer promising avenues for improving text simplification in the medical field.

Medical Text Simplification: Optimizing for Readability with Unlikelihood Training and Reranked Beam Search Decoding

Conversational query production is an emerging fundamental task for the dialogue system, where search queries are generated to explore the vast and continually updating knowledge from a search engine. To accelerate this line of research, previous studies have released several datasets with human-annotated search queries. However, the limited annotations still can not cover conversations of various domains. To solve this challenge, we propose a novel domain adaptation framework. It is inspired by a weakly supervised learning algorithm from previous work that guides a model using reinforcement learning with BM25 scores as feedback. Though effective, it is fragile facing noisy content on webpages from a commercial search engine and variance in conversations because of ignoring deep semantic information of dialogue contexts. Thus, we improve the algorithm by taking the advance of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and exploring several practical techniques such as knowledge distillation for stable training. We conduct experiments in multiple settings across different languages. Guided by the RAG model feedback, our model is more robust and performs significantly better especially in a more challenging setting over strong baselines.

Domain Adaptation for Conversational Query Production with the RAG Model Feedback

Benefiting from massive corpora and advanced hardware, large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in language understanding and generation. However, their performance degrades in scenarios where multiple tasks are encountered sequentially, also known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we propose orthogonal low-rank adaptation (O-LoRA), a simple and efficient approach for continual learning in language models, effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting while learning new tasks. Specifically, O-LoRA learns tasks in different (low-rank) vector subspaces that are kept orthogonal to each other in order to minimize interference. Our method induces only marginal additional parameter costs and requires no user data storage for replay. Experimental results on continual learning benchmarks show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, compared to previous approaches, our method excels in preserving the generalization ability of LLMs on unseen tasks.

Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning

When re-finding items, users who forget or are uncertain about identifying details often rely on creative strategies for expressing their information needs---complex queries that describe content elements (e.g., book characters or events), information beyond the document text (e.g., descriptions of book covers), or personal context (e.g., when they read a book). Standard retrieval models that rely on lexical or semantic overlap between query and document text are challenged in such retrieval settings, known as tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) retrieval.
We introduce a simple but effective framework for handling such complex queries by decomposing the query with an LLM into individual clues routing those as subqueries to specialized retrievers, and ensembling the results.
Our approach takes advantage of off-the-shelf retrievers (e.g., CLIP for retrieving images of book covers) or incorporate retriever-specific logic (e.g., date constraints). We show that our framework incorporating query decomposition into retrievers can improve gold book recall up to 6\% absolute gain for Recall@5 on a new collection of 14,441 real-world query-book pairs from an online community for resolving TOT inquiries.

Decomposing Complex Queries for Tip-of-the-tongue Retrieval

While many prior studies have applied computational approaches, such as machine learning, to detect and moderate hate speech, only scant attention has been paid to the task of identifying the underlying cause of hate speech. In this study, we introduce the concept of hate instigating speech, which refers to a specific type of textual posts on online platforms that stimulate or provoke others to engage in hate speech. The identification of hate instigating speech carries substantial practical implications for effective hate speech moderation. Rather than targeting individual instances of hate speech, by focusing on their roots, i.e., hate instigating speech, it becomes possible to significantly reduce the volume of content that requires review for moderation. Additionally, targeting hate instigating speech enables early prevention of the spread and propagation of hate speech, further enhancing the effectiveness of moderation efforts. However, several challenges hinder researchers from addressing the identification of hate instigating speech. First, there is a lack of comprehensive datasets specifically annotated for hate instigation, making it difficult to train and evaluate computational models effectively. Second, the subtle and nuanced nature of hate instigating speech (e.g., seemingly non-offensive texts serve as catalysts for triggering hate speech) makes it difficult to apply off-the-shelf machine learning models to the problem. To address these challenges, in this study, we have developed and released a multilingual dataset specifically designed for the task of identifying hate instigating speech. Specifically, it encompasses both English and Korean, allowing for a comprehensive examination of hate instigating speech across different linguistic contexts. We have applied existing machine learning models to our dataset and the results demonstrate that the extant models alone are insufficient for effectively detecting hate instigating speech. This finding highlights the need for further attention from the academic community to address this specific challenge. We expect our study and dataset to inspire researchers to explore innovative methods that can enhance the accuracy of hate instigating speech detection, ultimately contributing to more effective moderation and prevention of hate speech propagation online.

Uncovering the Root of Hate Speech: A Dataset for Identifying Hate Instigating Speech

We introduce a new task called *entity-centric question generation* (ECQG), motivated by real-world applications such as topic-specific learning, assisted reading, and fact-checking. The task aims to generate questions from an entity perspective. To solve ECQG, we propose a coherent PLM-based framework GenCONE with two novel modules: content focusing and question verification. The content focusing module first identifies a focus as "what to ask" to form draft questions, and the question verification module refines the questions afterwards by verifying the answerability. We also construct a large-scale open-domain dataset from SQuAD to support this task. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that GenCONE significantly and consistently outperforms various baselines, and two modules are effective and complementary in generating high-quality questions.

Ask To The Point: Open-Domain Entity-Centric Question Generation

We investigate the predictability of large language model (LLM) capabilities: given records of past experiments using different model families, numbers of parameters, tasks, and numbers of in-context examples, can we accurately predict LLM performance on new experiment configurations? Answering this question has practical implications for LLM users (e.g., deciding which models to try), developers (e.g., prioritizing evaluation on representative tasks), and the research community (e.g., identifying hard-to-predict capabilities that warrant further investigation).

We study the performance prediction problem on experiment records from BIG-bench. On a random train-test split, an MLP-based predictor achieves an $R^2$ score greater than 95%, indicating the presence of learnable patterns within the experiment records. We then formulate the problem of searching for "small-bench," an informative subset of BIG-bench tasks from which the performance on the full set can be maximally recovered. We find a subset as informative as BIG-bench Hard for evaluating new model families, while being $3\times$ smaller. Additionally, we find competitive subsets by clustering task representations learned by our MLP-based predictor and selecting tasks close to cluster centroids, highlighting the importance of task diversity in constructing "small-bench."

How Predictable Are Large Language Model Capabilities? A Case Study on BIG-bench

Large Language models (LLMs) possess the capability to engage In-context Learning (ICL) by leveraging a few demonstrations pertaining to a new downstream task as conditions. However, this particular learning paradigm suffers from high instability stemming from substantial variances induced by factors such as the input distribution of selected examples, their ordering, and prompt formats. In this work, we demonstrate that even when all these factors are held constant, the random selection of examples still results in high variance. Consequently, we aim to explore the informative ability of data examples by quantifying the Information Gain (IG) obtained in prediction after observing a given example candidate. Then we propose to sample those with maximum IG. Additionally, we identify the presence of template bias, which can lead to unfair evaluations of IG during the sampling process. To mitigate this bias, we introduce Calibration Before Sampling strategy. The experimental results illustrate that our proposed method can yield an average relative improvement of 14.3\% across six classification tasks using three LLMs.

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Non-parallel Accent Transfer based on Fine-grained Controllable Accent Modelling

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Non-parallel Accent Transfer based on Fine-grained Controllable Accent Modelling

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Tiny Titans: Can Smaller Large Language Models Punch Above Their Weight in the Real World for Meeting Summarization?

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PRESENTATIONS

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