Singapore

Due to the remarkable language understanding and generation abilities of large language models (LLMs), their use in educational applications has been explored. However, little work has been done on investigating the pedagogical ability of LLMs in helping students to learn mathematics. In this position paper, we discuss the challenges associated with employing LLMs to enhance students&#39; mathematical problem-solving skills by providing adaptive feedback. Apart from generating the wrong reasoning processes, LLMs can misinterpret the meaning of the question, and also exhibit difficulty in understanding the given questions&#39; rationales when attempting to correct students&#39; answers. Three research questions are formulated.

EMNLP 2023

Three Questions Concerning the Use of Large Language Models to Facilitate Mathematics Learning

mathematics education

large language model

math word problem solving

**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

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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.

Due to the remarkable language understanding and generation abilities of large language models (LLMs), their use in educational applications has been explored. However, little work has been done on investigating the pedagogical ability of LLMs in helping students to learn mathematics. In this position paper, we discuss the challenges associated with employing LLMs to enhance students' mathematical problem-solving skills by providing adaptive feedback. Apart from generating the wrong reasoning processes, LLMs can misinterpret the meaning of the question, and also exhibit difficulty in understanding the given questions' rationales when attempting to correct students' answers. Three research questions are formulated.

poster

Meanings of words change over time and across domains.
Detecting the semantic changes of words is an important task for various NLP applications that must make time-sensitive predictions.
We consider the problem of predicting whether a given target word, $w$, changes its meaning between two different text corpora, $\mathcal{C}_1$ and $\mathcal{C}_2$.
For this purpose, we propose $\textit{Swapping-based Semantic Change Detection}$ (SSCD), an unsupervised method that randomly swaps contexts between $\mathcal{C}_1$ and $\mathcal{C}_2$ where $w$ occurs.
We then look at the distribution of contextualised word embeddings of $w$, obtained from a pretrained masked language model (MLM), representing the meaning of $w$ in its occurrence contexts in $\mathcal{C}_1$ and $\mathcal{C}_2$.
Intuitively, if the meaning of $w$ does not change between $\mathcal{C}_1$ and $\mathcal{C}_2$, we would expect the distributions of contextualised word embeddings of $w$ to remain the same before and after this random swapping process.
Despite its simplicity, we demonstrate that even by using pretrained MLMs without any fine-tuning, our proposed context swapping method accurately predicts the semantic changes of words in four languages (English, German, Swedish, and Latin) and across different time spans (over 50 years and about five years).
Moreover, our method achieves significant performance improvements compared to strong baselines for the English semantic change prediction task. Source code is available at https://github.com/a1da4/svp-swap .

Swap and Predict -- Predicting the Semantic Changes in Words across Corpora by Context Swapping

Text image machine translation (TIMT) which translates source language text images into target language texts has attracted intensive attention in recent years. Although the end-to-end TIMT model directly generates target translation from encoded text image features with an efficient architecture, it lacks the recognized source language information resulting in a decrease in translation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Cross-modal Cross-lingual Interactive Model (CCIM) to incorporate source language information by synchronously generating source language and target language results through an interactive attention mechanism between two language decoders. Extensive experimental results have shown the interactive decoder significantly outperforms end-to-end TIMT models and has faster decoding speed with smaller model size than cascade models.

CCIM: Cross-modal Cross-lingual Interactive Image Translation

End-to-end multilingual entity linking (MEL) is concerned with identifying multilingual entity mentions and their corresponding entity IDs in a knowledge base. Existing works assumed that entity mentions were given and skipped the entity mention detection step due to a lack of high-quality multilingual training corpora. To overcome this limitation, we propose mReFinED, the first end-to-end multilingual entity linking. Additionally, we propose a bootstrapping mention detection framework that enhances the quality of training corpora. Our experimental results demonstrated that mReFinED outperformed the best existing work in the end-to-end MEL task while being 44 times faster.

mReFinED: An Efficient End-to-End Multilingual Entity Linking System

Providing explainable and faithful feedback is crucial for automated student answer assessment. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that explores using ChatGPT, a cutting-edge large language model, for the concurrent tasks of student answer scoring and rationale generation. We identify the appropriate instructions by prompting ChatGPT with different templates to collect the rationales, where inconsistent rationales are refined to align with marking standards. The refined ChatGPT outputs enable us to fine-tune a smaller language model that simultaneously assesses student answers and provides rationales. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset show that the proposed method improves the overall QWK score by 11% compared to ChatGPT. Furthermore, our thorough analysis and human evaluation demonstrate that the rationales generated by our proposed method are comparable to those of ChatGPT. Our approach provides a viable solution to achieve explainable automated assessment in education

Distilling ChatGPT for Explainable Automated Student Answer Assessment

If a question cannot be answered with the available information, robust systems for question answering (QA) should know *not* to answer.
One way to build QA models that do this is with additional training data comprised of unanswerable questions, created either by employing annotators or through automated methods for unanswerable question generation.
To show that the model complexity of existing automated approaches is not justified, we examine a simpler data augmentation method for unanswerable question generation in English: performing antonym and entity swaps on answerable questions.
Compared to the prior state-of-the-art, data generated with our training-free and lightweight strategy results in better models (+1.6 F1 points on SQuAD 2.0 data with BERT-large), and has higher human-judged relatedness and readability.
We quantify the raw benefits of our approach compared to no augmentation across multiple encoder models, using different amounts of generated data, and also on TydiQA-MinSpan data (+9.3 F1 points with BERT-large).
Our results establish swaps as a simple but strong baseline for future work.

A Lightweight Method to Generate Unanswerable Questions in English

Thematic analysis (TA) has been widely used
for analyzing qualitative data in many disciplines and fields. To ensure reliable analysis,
the same piece of data is typically assigned to at least two human coders. Moreover, to produce
meaningful and useful analysis, human coders
develop and deepen their data interpretation
and coding over multiple iterations, making TA
labor-intensive and time-consuming. Recently
the emerging field of large language models
(LLMs) research has shown that LLMs have
the potential replicate human-like behavior in
various tasks: in particular, LLMs outperform
crowd workers on text-annotation tasks, suggesting an opportunity to leverage LLMs on
TA. We propose a human–LLM collaboration
framework (i.e., LLM-in-the-loop) to conduct
TA with in-context learning (ICL). This framework provides the prompt to frame discussions
with a LLM (e.g., GPT-3.5) to generate the final
codebook for TA. We demonstrate the utility
of this framework using survey datasets on the
aspects of the music listening experience and
the usage of a password manager. Results of
the two case studies show that the proposed
framework yields similar coding quality to that
of human coders but reduces TA’s labor and
time demands.

LLM-in-the-loop: Leveraging Large Language Model for Thematic Analysis

Vulnerability to lexical perturbation is a critical weakness of automatic evaluation metrics for image captioning. This paper proposes Perturbation Robust Multi-Lingual CLIPScore(PR-MCS), which exhibits robustness to such perturbations, as a novel reference-free image captioning metric applicable to multiple languages. To achieve perturbation robustness, we fine-tune the text encoder of CLIP with our language-agnostic method to distinguish the perturbed text from the original text. To verify the robustness of PR-MCS, we introduce a new fine-grained evaluation dataset consisting of detailed captions, critical objects, and the relationships between the objects for 3,000 images in five languages. In our experiments, PR-MCS significantly outperforms baseline metrics in capturing lexical noise of all various perturbation types in all five languages, while maintaining a strong correlation with human judgments.

PR-MCS: Perturbation Robust Metric for MultiLingual Image Captioning

Recent developments in generative AI have shone a spotlight on high-performance synthetic text generation technologies. The now wide availability and ease of use of such models highlights the urgent need to provide equally powerful technologies capable of identifying synthetic text. With this in mind, we draw inspiration from psychological studies which suggest that people can be driven by emotion and encode emotion in the text they compose. We hypothesize that pretrained language models (PLMs) have an affective deficit because they lack such an emotional driver when generating text and consequently may generate synthetic text which has affective incoherence i.e. lacking the kind of emotional coherence present in human-authored text. We subsequently develop an emotionally aware detector by fine-tuning a PLM on emotion. Experiment results indicate that our emotionally-aware detector achieves improvements across a range of synthetic text generators, various sized models, datasets, and domains. Finally, we compare our emotionally-aware synthetic text detector to ChatGPT in the task of identification of its own output and show substantial gains, reinforcing the potential of emotion as a signal to identify synthetic text. Code, models, and datasets are available at https: //github.com/alanagiasi/emoPLMsynth

Do Stochastic Parrots have Feelings Too? Improving Neural Detection of Synthetic Text via Emotion Recognition

Debatepedia is a publicly available dataset consisting of arguments and counter-arguments on controversial topics that has been widely used for the single-document query-focused abstractive summarization task in recent years. However, it has been recently found that this dataset is limited by noise and even most queries in this dataset do not have any relevance to the respective document. In this paper, we study whether large language models (LLMs) can be utilized to clean the Debatepedia dataset to make it suitable for query-focused abstractive summarization. More specifically, we harness the language generation capabilities of two LLMs, namely, ChatGPT and PaLM to regenerate its queries. Based on our experiments, we find that solely depending on large language models for query correction may not be very useful for data cleaning. However, we observe that leveraging a rule-based approach for
data sampling followed by query regeneration using LLMs (especially ChatGPT) for the sampled instances may ensure a higher quality version of this dataset suitable for the development of more generalized query-focused text summarization models.

Can Large Language Models Fix Data Annotation Errors? An Empirical Study Using Debatepedia for Query-Focused Text Summarization

We present an analysis tool based on joint matrix factorization for comparing latent representations of multilingual and monolingual models. An alternative to probing, this tool allows us to analyze multiple sets of representations in a joint manner. Using this tool, we study to what extent and how morphosyntactic features are reflected in the representations learned by multilingual pre-trained models. We conduct a large-scale empirical study of over 33 languages and 17 morphosyntactic categories. Our findings demonstrate variations in the encoding of morphosyntactic information across upper and lower layers, with category-specific differences influenced by language properties. Hierarchical clustering of the factorization outputs yields a tree structure that is related to phylogenetic trees manually crafted by linguists. Moreover, we find the factorization outputs exhibit strong associations with performance observed across different cross-lingual tasks. 
We release our code to facilitate future research.

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Swap and Predict -- Predicting the Semantic Changes in Words across Corpora by Context Swapping

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Three Questions Concerning the Use of Large Language Models to Facilitate Mathematics Learning

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