Data contamination has become prevalent and challenging with the rise of models pretrained on large automatically-crawled corpora. 
For closed models, the training data becomes a trade secret, and even for open models, it is not trivial to detect contamination.
Strategies such as leaderboards with hidden answers, or using test data which is guaranteed to be unseen, are expensive and become fragile with time. Assuming that all relevant actors value clean test data and will cooperate to mitigate data contamination, what can be done? 
We propose three strategies that can make a difference: 
(1) Test data made public should be encrypted with a public key and licensed
to disallow derivative distribution;
(2) demand training exclusion controls from closed API holders, and protect your test data by refusing to evaluate without them; 
(3) avoid data which appears with its solution on the internet, and release the web-page context of internet-derived data along with the data.
These strategies are practical and can be effective in preventing data contamination.

Stop Uploading Test Data in Plain Text: Practical Strategies for Mitigating Data Contamination by Evaluation Benchmarks

A growing area of research investigates augmenting language models with tools (e.g., search engines, calculators) to overcome their shortcomings (e.g., missing or incorrect knowledge, incorrect logical inferences). Various few-shot tool-usage strategies have been proposed. However, there is no systematic and fair comparison across different strategies, or between these strategies and strong baselines that do not leverage tools. We conduct an extensive empirical analysis, finding that (1) across various datasets, example difficulty levels, and models, strong no-tool baselines are competitive to tool-assisted strategies, implying that effectively using tools with in-context demonstrations is a difficult unsolved problem; (2) for knowledge-retrieval tasks, strategies that *refine* incorrect outputs with tools outperform strategies that retrieve relevant information *ahead of* or *during generation*; (3) tool-assisted strategies are expensive in the number of tokens they require to work---incurring additional costs by orders of magnitude---which does not translate into significant improvement in performance. Overall, our findings suggest that few-shot tool integration is still an open challenge, emphasizing the need for comprehensive evaluations of future strategies to accurately assess their *benefits* and *costs*.

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Tool-Assisted Generation Strategies

Word-level saliency explanations ("heat maps over words") are often used to communicate feature-attribution in text-based models. Recent studies found that superficial factors such as word length can distort human interpretation of the communicated saliency scores. We conduct a user study to investigate how the marking of a word's *neighboring words* affect the explainee's perception of the word's importance in the context of a saliency explanation.We find that neighboring words have significant effects on the word's importance rating.Concretely, we identify that the influence changes based on neighboring direction (left vs. right) and a-priori linguistic and computational measures of phrases and collocations (vs. unrelated neighboring words).Our results question whether text-based saliency explanations should be continued to be communicated at word level, and inform future research on alternative saliency explanation methods.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/kgQkh7cPzt9VEM52HG3MJu/embed/polls/bc4ba7fb-d393-4647-8161-40f02128c283" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Neighboring Words Affect Human Interpretation of Saliency Explanations

We find that the requirement of model interpretations to be faithful is vague and incomplete. With interpretation by textual highlights as a case-study, we present several failure cases. Borrowing concepts from social science, we identify that the problem is a misalignment between the causal chain of decisions (causal attribution) and the attribution of human behavior to the interpretation (social attribution). We re-formulate faithfulness as an accurate attribution of causality to the model, and introduce the concept of aligned faithfulness: faithful causal chains that are aligned with their expected social behavior. The two steps of causal attribution and social attribution together complete the process of explaining behavior. With this formalization, we characterize various failures of misaligned faithful highlight interpretations, and propose an alternative causal chain to remedy the issues. Finally, we implement highlight explanations of the proposed causal format using contrastive explanations.

Aligning Faithful Interpretations with their Social Attribution

Contrastive explanations clarify why an event occurred in contrast to another. They are more inherently intuitive to humans to both produce and comprehend. We propose a methodology to produce contrastive explanations for classification models by modifying the representation to disregard non-contrastive information, and modifying model behavior to only be based on contrastive reasoning. Our method is based on projecting model representation to a latent space that captures only the features that are useful (to the model) to differentiate two potential decisions. We demonstrate the value of contrastive explanations by analyzing two different scenarios, using both high-level abstract concept attribution and low-level input token/span attribution, on two widely used text classification tasks. Specifically, we produce explanations for answering: for which label, and against which alternative label, is some aspect of the input useful? And which aspects of the input are useful for and against particular decisions? Overall, our findings shed light on the ability of label-contrastive explanations to provide a more accurate and finer-grained interpretability of a model's decision.

Contrastive Explanations for Model Interpretability

A growing body of work makes use of probing in order to investigate the working of neural models, often considered black boxes. Recently, an ongoing debate emerged surrounding the limitations of the probing paradigm. In this work, we point out the inability to infer behavioral conclusions from probing results, and offer an alternative method that focuses on how the information is being used, rather than on what information is encoded. Our method, Amnesic Probing, follows the intuition that the utility of a property for a given task can be assessed by measuring the influence of a causal intervention that removes it from the representation. Equipped with this new analysis tool, we can ask questions that were not possible before, for example, is part-of-speech information important for word prediction? We perform a series of analyses on BERT to answer these types of questions. Our findings demonstrate that conventional probing performance is not correlated to task importance, and we call for increased scrutiny of claims that draw behavioral or causal conclusions from probing results.

Amnesic Probing: Behavioral Explanation With Amnesic Counterfactuals

Theme Track: Large Language Models and the Future of NLP 1

technical paper

**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

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

**Are you attending this poster session virtually?** 
 Virtual posters are presented in Gather Town. Connect by clicking on the link that you can find in the 'Abstracts' tab of the posters.
 
**Are you attending this poster session in person?**
Virtual posters are presented in Gather Town. Connect by clicking on the link that you can find in the 'Abstracts' tab of the posters.

PS2 (GatherTown) Posters, Demo, Industry, Findings

poster

*This is an IN-PERSON ONLY workshop. Session recording will be available here.* **Workshop Organizers:** Sebastian Gehrmann, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Alex Wang, Elizabeth Clark, Kaustubh Dhole and João Sedoc
 *Coffee Break 10:30 am* 
*Lunch Break 12:30 pm* 
*Coffee Break 3:30 pm* [**Workshop Website**](https://gem-benchmark.com/workshop) Many new NLP applications are cast through the lens of natural language generation. With the advent of these new approaches, many opportunities arise: generation in previously less studied languages, new evaluation paradigms, methods for corpus creation, more efficient architectures, strategies for safe deployments, among many others. At the same time, we can learn from the rich history of NLG research to further improve generation methods. These developments require robust and sound NLG evaluation processes. To that end, the GEM workshop aims to encourage the development of model auditing and human evaluation strategies, and to popularize model evaluations in languages beyond English. [**Schedule**](https://gem-benchmark.com/workshop)
 [**Go to Gather**](https://app.gather.town/app/ROH1myZvp9ba7a3C/EMNLP2023?spawnToken=X1A0B-iFRmqFCtKJHm-D)

W11: Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metric (GEM)

workshop paper

Findings papers without presentation slot

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

**Session Chair: **David Jurgens 
**In Person Volunteer:** Ananya B Sai 
** Remote Volunteer:** Anastasiia Sedova

1E: Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

<iframe style="width:700px;height:400px" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/ceby/" seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe>

Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

3G - In Person Poster Session

Virtual Poster Session III: Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP

Poster 3E: Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

**Reminder2:** Underline site will open closer to the event. If you already registered you will receive access detail

Registration is now open

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Alon Jacovi

9

21

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Stop Uploading Test Data in Plain Text: Practical Strategies for Mitigating Data Contamination by Evaluation Benchmarks

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Tool-Assisted Generation Strategies

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Tool-Assisted Generation Strategies

Neighboring Words Affect Human Interpretation of Saliency Explanations

Aligning Faithful Interpretations with their Social Attribution

Contrastive Explanations for Model Interpretability

Contrastive Explanations for Model Interpretability

Aligning Faithful Interpretations with their Social Attribution

Amnesic Probing: Behavioral Explanation With Amnesic Counterfactuals

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