Singapore

Adjusting for latent covariates is crucial for estimating causal effects from observational textual data. Most existing methods only account for confounding covariates that affect both treatment and outcome, potentially leading to biased causal effects. This bias arises from insufficient consideration of non-confounding covariates, which are relevant only to either the treatment or the outcome. In this work, we aim to mitigate the bias by unveiling interactions between different variables to disentangle the non-confounding covariates when estimating causal effects from text. The disentangling process ensures covariates only contribute to their respective objectives, enabling independence between variables. Additionally, we impose a constraint to balance representations from the treated group and control group to alleviate selection bias. We conduct experiments on two different treatment factors under various scenarios, and the proposed model significantly outperforms recent strong baselines. Furthermore, our thorough analysis on earnings call transcripts demonstrates that our model can effectively disentangle the variables, and further investigations into real-world scenarios provide guidance for investors to make informed decisions.

EMNLP 2023

Causal Inference from Text: Unveiling Interactions between Variables

non-confounding covariates

disentanglement

natural language processing

causal inference

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.

We investigate MT evaluation metric performance on adversarially-synthesized texts, to shed light on metric robustness. We experiment with word- and character-level attacks on three popular machine translation metrics: BERTScore, BLEURT, and COMET. Our human experiments validate that automatic metrics tend to overpenalize adversarially-degraded translations. We also identify inconsistencies in BERTScore ratings, where it judges the original sentence and the adversarially-degraded one as similar, while judging the degraded translation as notably worse than the original with respect to the reference. We identify patterns of brittleness that motivate more robust metric development.

Robustness Tests for Automatic Machine Translation Metrics with Adversarial Attacks

In this paper, we propose SRL4NLP, a new approach for data augmentation by drawing an analogy between image and text processing: Super-resolution learning. This method is based on using high-resolution images to overcome the problem of low resolution images. While this technique is a common usage in image processing when images have a low resolution or are too noisy, it has never been used in NLP. We therefore propose the first adaptation of this method for text classification and evaluate its effectiveness on urgency detection from tweets posted in crisis situations, a very challenging task where messages are scarce and highly imbalanced. We show that this strategy is efficient when compared to competitive state-of-the-art data augmentation techniques on several benchmarks datasets in two languages.

Image and Text: Fighting the same Battle? Super Resolution Learning for Imbalanced Text Classification

Learned representations at the level of characters, sub-words, words, and sentences, have each contributed to advances in understanding different NLP tasks and linguistic phenomena. However, learning textual embeddings is costly as they are tokenization specific and require different models to be trained for each level of abstraction. We introduce a novel language representation model which can learn to compress to different levels of abstraction at different layers of the same model. We apply Nonparametric Variational Information Bottleneck (NVIB) to stacked Transformer self-attention layers in the encoder, which encourages an information-theoretic compression of the representations through the model. 
We find that the layers within the model correspond to increasing levels of abstraction
and that their representations are more linguistically informed. Finally, we show that NVIB compression results in a model which is more robust to adversarial perturbations.

Learning to Abstract with Nonparametric Variational Information Bottleneck

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has been widely studied since the explosive growth of social networking services. However, the recognition of implicit sentiments that do not contain obvious opinion words remains less explored. In this paper, we propose aspect-category enhanced learning with a neural coherence model (ELCoM). It captures document-level coherence by using contrastive learning, and sentence-level by a hypergraph to mine opinions from explicit sentences to aid implicit sentiment classification. To address the issue of sentences with different sentiment polarities in the same category, we perform cross-category enhancement to offset the impact of anomalous nodes in the hypergraph and obtain sentence representations with enhanced aspect-category. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the ELCoM achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our source codes and data are released at \url{https://github.com/cuijin-23/ELCoM}.

Aspect-Category Enhanced Learning with a Neural Coherence Model for Implicit Sentiment Analysis

Stance detection is an increasingly popular task that has been mainly modeled as a static task, by assigning the expressed attitude of a text toward a given topic. Such a framing presents limitations, with trained systems showing poor generalization capabilities and being strongly topic-dependent. In this work, we propose modeling stance as a dynamic task, by focusing on the interactions between a message and their replies. For this purpose, we present a new annotation scheme that enables the categorization of all kinds of textual interactions. As a result, we have created a new corpus, the Dynamic Stance Corpus (DySC), consisting of three datasets in two middle-resourced languages: Catalan and Dutch. Our data analysis further supports our modeling decisions, empirically showing differences between the annotation of stance in static and dynamic contexts. We fine-tuned a series of monolingual and multilingual models on DySC, showing portability across topics and languages.

Dynamic Stance: Modeling Discussions by Labeling the Interactions

AI and NLP publication venues have increasingly encouraged researchers to reflect on possible ethical considerations, adverse impacts, and other responsible AI issues their work might engender. However, for specific NLP tasks our understanding of how prevalent such issues are, or when and why these issues are likely to arise, remains limited. Focusing on text summarization—a common NLP task largely overlooked by the responsible AI community—we examine research and reporting practices in the current literature. We conduct a multi-round qualitative analysis of 333 summarization papers from the ACL Anthology published between 2020–2022. We focus on how, which, and when responsible AI issues are covered, which relevant stakeholders are considered, and mismatches between stated and realized research goals. We also discuss current evaluation practices and consider how authors discuss the limitations of both prior work and their own work. Overall, we find that relatively few papers engage with possible stakeholders or contexts of use, which limits their consideration of potential downstream adverse impacts or other responsible AI issues. Based on our findings, we make recommendations on concrete practices and research directions.

Responsible AI Considerations in Text Summarization Research: A Review of Current Practices | VIDEO

Stylistic headline generation is the task to generate a headline that not only summarizes the content of an article, but also reflects a desired style that attracts users. As style-specific article-headline pairs are scarce, previous researches focus on unsupervised approaches with a standard headline generation dataset and mono-style corpora. In this work, we follow this line and propose StyleBART, an unsupervised approach for stylistic headline generation. Our method decorates the pretrained BART model with adapters that are responsible for different styles and allows the generation of headlines with diverse styles by simply switching the adapters. Different from previous works, StyleBART separates the task of style learning and headline generation, making it possible to freely combine the base model and the style adapters during inference. We further propose an inverse paraphrasing task to enhance the style adapters. Extensive automatic and human evaluations show that StyleBART achieves new state-of-the-art performance in the unsupervised stylistic headline generation task, producing high-quality headlines with the desired style.

StyleBART: Decorate Pretrained Model with Style Adapters for Unsupervised Stylistic Headline Generation

Question generation is a widely used data augmentation approach with extensive applications, and extracting qualified candidate answers from context passages is a critical step for most question generation systems. However, existing methods for candidate answer extraction are reliant on linguistic rules or annotated data that face the partial annotation issue and challenges in generalization. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel unsupervised candidate answer extraction approach that leverages the inherent structure of context passages through a Differentiable Masker-Reconstructor (DMR) Model with the enforcement of self-consistency for picking up salient information tokens. We curated two datasets with exhaustively-annotated answers and benchmark a comprehensive set of supervised and unsupervised candidate answer extraction methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the DMR model by showing its performance is superior among unsupervised methods and comparable to supervised methods.

Unsupervised Candidate Answer Extraction through Differentiable Masker-Reconstructor Model

To enhance the multi-step reasoning capabilities of large language models, researchers have extensively explored prompting methods, notably the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) method which explicitly elicits human-like rationales. However, they have inadvertently overlooked the potential of enhancing model reasoning performance by formulating higher-quality problems \footnote{A reasoning problem often consists of two parts: the context and the final question \cite{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-2205-09712}.}. In this work, we start from the problem side and propose Self-Polish (SP), a novel method that facilitates the model's reasoning by guiding it to progressively refine the given problems to be more comprehensible and solvable. We also explore several automatic prompting varients and propose the Self-Polish prompt bank for the community. SP is orthogonal to all other prompting methods of answer/reasoning side like CoT, allowing for seamless integration with state-of-the-art techniques for further improvement. Thorough experiments show that the proposed method attains notable and consistent effectiveness on five reasoning benchmarks across different models. Furthermore, our method also showcases impressive performance on robustness evaluation. Codes and prompts are available at https://github.com/WooooDyy/Self-Polish.

Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement

In this paper, we explore the application of large language models (LLMs) for generating code-tracing questions in introductory programming courses. We designed targeted prompts for GPT4, guiding it to generate code-tracing questions based on code snippets and descriptions. We established a set of human evaluation metrics to assess the quality of questions produced by the model compared to those created by human experts. Our analysis provides insights into the capabilities and potential of LLMs in generating diverse code-tracing questions. Additionally, we present a unique dataset of human and LLM-generated tracing questions, serving as a valuable resource for both the education and NLP research communities. This work contributes to the ongoing dialogue on the potential uses of LLMs in educational settings.

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