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Despite advances in multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT), we argue that there are still two major challenges in this area: data imbalance and representation degeneration. The data imbalance problem refers to the imbalance in the amount of parallel corpora for all language pairs, especially for long-tail languages (i.e., very low-resource languages). The representation degeneration problem refers to the problem of encoded tokens tending to appear only in a small subspace of the full space available to the MNMT model. To solve these two issues, we propose Bi-ACL, a framework which only requires target-side monolingual data and a bilingual dictionary to improve the performance of the MNMT model. We define two modules, named bidirectional autoencoder and bidirectional contrastive learning, which we combine with an online constrained beam search and a curriculum learning sampling strategy. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method is more effective than strong baselines both in long-tail languages and in high-resource languages. We also demonstrate that our approach is capable of transferring knowledge between domains and languages in zero-shot scenarios.

EMNLP 2023

Mitigating Data Imbalance and Representation Degeneration in Multilingual Machine Translation

representation degeneration

data imbalance

multilingual machine translation

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.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited considerable cross-lingual generalization abilities, whereby they implicitly transfer knowledge across languages. However, the transfer is not equally successful for all languages, especially for low-resource ones, which poses an ongoing challenge. It is unclear whether we have reached the limits of implicit cross-lingual generalization and if explicit knowledge transfer is viable. In this paper, we investigate the potential for explicitly aligning conceptual correspondence between languages to enhance cross-lingual generalization. Using the syntactic aspect of language as a testbed, our analyses of 43 languages reveal a high degree of alignability among the spaces of structural concepts within each language for both encoder-only and decoder-only LLMs. We then propose a meta-learning-based method to learn to align conceptual spaces of different languages, which facilitates zero-shot and few-shot generalization in concept classification and also offers insights into the cross-lingual in-context learning phenomenon. Experiments on syntactic analysis tasks show that our approach achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods and narrows the performance gap between languages, particularly benefiting those with limited resources.

Are Structural Concepts Universal in Transformer Language Models? Towards Interpretable Cross-Lingual Generalization

Enhancing the zero-shot performance of instruction-following models requires heavy computation, either by scaling the total number of training datasets or the model size. In this work, we explore how retrieval of soft prompts obtained through prompt tuning can efficiently assist hard prompts in zero-shot task generalization. Specifically, we train soft prompt embeddings for each prompt through prompt tuning, store the samples of the training instances mapped with the prompt embeddings, and retrieve the corresponding prompt embedding of the training instance closest to the query instance during inference. While only adding 0.007% additional parameters, retrieval of soft prompt enhances the performance of T0 on unseen tasks by outperforming it on 10 out of 11 datasets as well as improving the mean accuracy of T0 on BIG-bench benchmark by 2.39% points. Also, we report an interesting finding that retrieving source embeddings trained on similar answer choice formats is more important than those on similar task types.

Efficiently Enhancing Zero-Shot Performance of Instruction Following Model via Retrieval of Soft Prompt

Framing bias plays a significant role in exacerbating political polarization by distorting the perception of actual events.
Media outlets with divergent political stances often use polarized language in their reporting of the same event.
We propose a new loss function that encourages the model to minimize the polarity difference between the polarized input articles to reduce framing bias. Specifically, our loss is designed to jointly optimize the model to map polarity ends bidirectionally.
Our experimental results demonstrate that incorporating the proposed polarity minimization loss leads to a substantial reduction in framing bias when compared to a BART-based multi-document summarization model. Notably, we find that the effectiveness of this approach is most pronounced when the model is trained to minimize the polarity loss associated with informational framing bias (i.e., skewed selection of information to report).

Mitigating Framing Bias with Polarity Minimization Loss

We present ASPIRO, an approach for structured data verbalisation into short template sentences in zero to few-shot settings. Unlike previous methods, our approach prompts Large Language Models (LLMs) to directly produce entity-agnostic templates, rather than relying on LLMs to faithfully copy the given example entities, or validating/crafting the templates manually. We incorporate LLM re-prompting, triggered by algorithmic parsing checks, as well as the PARENT metric induced consistency validation to identify and rectify template generation problems in real-time. ASPIRO, compared to direct LLM output, averages 66% parsing error rate reduction in generated verbalisations of RDF triples on the DART dataset. Our best 5-shot text-davinci-003 setup, scoring BLEU of 50.62, METEOR of 45.16, BLEURT of 0.82, NUBIA of 0.87, and PARENT of 0.8962 on the Rel2Text dataset, competes effectively with recent fine-tuned pretrained language models.

ASPIRO: Any-shot Structured Parsing-error-Induced ReprOmpting for Consistent Data-to-Text Generation

Document-Level Relation Extraction aims at predicting relations between entities from multiple sentences. A common practice is to select multi-label classification thresholds to decide whether a relation exists between an entity pair. However, in the document-level task, most entity pairs do not express any relations, resulting in a highly imbalanced distribution between positive and negative classes. We argue that the imbalance problem affects threshold selection and may lead to incorrect "no-relation" predictions. In this paper, we propose to down-weight the easy negatives by utilizing a distance between the classification threshold and the predicted score of each relation. Our novel Adaptive Hinge Balance Loss measures the difficulty of each relation class with the distance, putting more focus on hard, misclassified relations, i.e. the minority positive relations. Experiment results on Re-DocRED demonstrate the superiority of our approach over other balancing methods. Source codes are available at https://github.com/Jize-W/HingeABL.

Adaptive Hinge Balance Loss for Document-Level Relation Extraction

We present The Vault, an open-source dataset of high quality code-text pairs in multiple programming languages for training large language models to understand and generate code. We propose methods for thoroughly extracting samples that use both rules and deep learning to ensure that they contain high-quality pairs of code and text, resulting in a dataset of 43 million high-quality code-text pairs. We thoroughly evaluated this dataset and discovered that when used to train common code language models (such as CodeT5, CodeBERT, and CodeGen), it outperforms the same models train on other datasets such as CodeSearchNet. These evaluations included common coding tasks such as code generation, code summarization, and code search. The Vault can be used by researchers and practitioners to train a wide range of big language models that understand code. Alternatively, researchers can use our data cleaning methods and scripts to improve their own datasets. We anticipate that using The Vault to train large language models will improve their ability to understand and generate code, propelling AI research and software development forward. We are releasing our source code and a framework to make it easier for others to replicate our results.

The Vault: A Comprehensive Multilingual Dataset for Advancing Code Understanding and Generation

In this paper, we address the limitations of the common data annotation and training methods for objective single-label classification tasks. Typically, when annotating such tasks annotators are only asked to provide a single label for each sample and annotator disagreement is discarded when a final hard label is decided through majority voting. We challenge this traditional approach, acknowledging that determining the appropriate label can be difficult due to the ambiguity and lack of context in the data samples. Rather than discarding the information from such ambiguous annotations, our soft label method makes use of them for training. Our findings indicate that additional annotator information, such as confidence, secondary label and disagreement, can be used to effectively generate soft labels. Training classifiers with these soft labels then leads to improved performance and calibration on the hard label test set.

Don't waste a single annotation: improving single-label classifiers through soft labels

Recognizing entities in texts is a central need in many information-seeking scenarios, and indeed, Named Entity Recognition (NER) is arguably one of the most successful examples of a widely adopted NLP task and corresponding NLP technology. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) appear to provide effective solutions (also) for NER tasks that were traditionally handled with dedicated models, often matching or surpassing the abilities of the dedicated models. Should NER be considered a solved problem? We argue to the contrary: the capabilities provided by LLMs are not the end of NER research, but rather an exciting beginning. They allow taking NER to the next level, tackling increasingly more useful, and increasingly more challenging, variants. We present three variants of the NER task, together with a dataset to support them. The first is a move towards more fine-grained---and intersectional---entity types. The second is a move towards zero-shot recognition and extraction of these fine-grained types based on entity-type labels. The third, and most challenging, is the move from the recognition setup to a novel retrieval setup, where the query is a zero-shot entity type, and the expected result is all the sentences from a large, pre-indexed corpus that contain entities of these types, and their corresponding spans. We show that all of these are far from being solved. We provide a large, silver-annotated corpus of 4 million paragraphs covering 500 entity types, to facilitate research towards all of these three goals.

NERetrieve: Dataset for Next Generation Named Entity Recognition and Retrieval

A salient characteristic of pre-trained language models (PTLMs) is a remarkable improvement in their generalization capability and emergence of new capabilities with increasing model capacity and pre-training dataset size. Consequently, we are witnessing the development of enormous models pushing the state-of-the-art. It is, however, imperative to realize that this inevitably leads to prohibitively long training times, extortionate computing costs, and a detrimental environmental impact. Significant efforts are underway to make PTLM training more efficient through innovations in model architectures, training pipelines, and loss function design, with scant attention being paid to optimizing the utility of training data. The key question that we ask is whether it is possible to train PTLMs by employing only highly informative subsets of the training data while maintaining downstream performance? Building upon the recent progress in informative data subset selection, we show how we can employ submodular optimization to select highly representative subsets of the training corpora and demonstrate that the proposed framework can be applied to efficiently train multiple PTLMs (BERT, BioBERT, GPT-2) using only a fraction of data. Further, we perform a rigorous empirical evaluation to show that the resulting models achieve up to $\sim99\%$ of the performance of the fully-trained models. We made our framework publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Efficient-AI/ingenious}.

INGENIOUS: Using Informative Data Subsets for Efficient Pre-Training of Language Models

Current approaches to automatic summarization of scientific papers generate informative summaries in the form of abstracts. However, abstracts are not intended to show the relationship between a paper and the references cited in it. We propose a new contextualized summarization approach that can generate an informative summary conditioned on a given sentence containing the citation of a reference (a so-called ``citance''). This summary outlines content of the cited paper relevant to the citation location. Thus, our approach extracts and models the citances of a paper, retrieves relevant passages from cited papers, and generates abstractive summaries tailored to each citance. We evaluate our approach using **Webis-Context-SciSumm-2023**, a new dataset containing 540K computer science papers and 4.6M citances therein.

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Mitigating Data Imbalance and Representation Degeneration in Multilingual Machine Translation

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Are Structural Concepts Universal in Transformer Language Models? Towards Interpretable Cross-Lingual Generalization

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