Recent language models enable new opportunities for structured reasoning with text, such as the construction of intuitive, proof-like textual entailment trees without relying on brittle formal logic. However, progress in this direction has been hampered by a long-standing lack of a clear protocol for determining what _valid decompositional entailment_ is. This absence causes noisy datasets and limited performance gains by modern neuro-symbolic entailment engines. To address these problems, we formulate a consistent and theoretically grounded approach to annotating decompositional entailment and evaluate its impact on LLM-based textual inference. We find that our new dataset, RDTE (Recognizing Decompositional Textual Entailment), has a substantially higher internal consistency than prior decompositional entailment datasets, suggesting that RDTE is a significant step forward in the long-standing problem of forming a clear protocol for discerning entailment. We also find that training an RDTE-oriented entailment classifier via knowledge distillation and employing it in an entailment tree reasoning engine significantly improves both accuracy and proof quality, illustrating the practical benefit of this advance for textual inference.

Enhancing Systematic Decompositional Natural Language Inference Using Informal Logic

Using large language models (LMs) for query or document expansion can improve generalization in information retrieval. However, it is unknown whether these techniques are universally beneficial or only effective in specific settings, such as for particular retrieval models, dataset domains, or query types. To answer this, we conduct the first comprehensive analysis of LM-based expansion. We find that there exists a strong negative correlation between retriever performance and gains from expansion: expansion improves scores for weaker models, but generally harms stronger models. We show this trend holds across a set of eleven expansion techniques, twelve datasets with diverse distribution shifts, and twenty-four retrieval models. Through qualitative error analysis, we hypothesize that although expansions provide extra information (potentially improving recall), they add additional noise that makes it difficult to discern between the top relevant documents (thus introducing false positives). Our results suggest the following recipe: use expansions for weaker models or when the target dataset significantly differs from training corpus in format; otherwise, avoid expansions to keep the relevance signal clear

When do Generative Query and Document Expansions Fail? A Comprehensive Study Across Methods, Retrievers, and Datasets

Negation is a common everyday phenomena and has been a consistent area of weakness for language models (LMs). Although the Information Retrieval (IR) community has adopted LMs as the backbone of modern IR architectures, there has been little to no research in understanding how negation impacts neural IR. We therefore construct a straightforward benchmark on this theme: asking IR models to rank two documents that differ only by negation. We show that the results vary widely according to the type of IR architecture: cross-encoders perform best, followed by late-interaction models, and in last place are bi-encoder and sparse neural architectures. We find that most current information retrieval models do not consider negation, performing similarly or worse than randomly ranking. We show that although the obvious approach of continued fine-tuning on a dataset of contrastive documents containing negations increases performance (as does model size), there is still a large gap between machine and human performance.

NevIR: Negation in Neural Information Retrieval

Recent work in open-domain question answering (ODQA) has shown that adversarial poisoning of the search collection can cause large drops in accuracy for production systems. However, little to no work has proposed methods to defend against these attacks. To do so, we rely on the intuition that redundant information often exists in large corpora. To find it, we introduce a method that uses query augmentation to search for a diverse set of passages that could answer the original question but are less likely to have been poisoned. We integrate these new passages into the model through the design of a novel confidence method, comparing the predicted answer to its appearance in the retrieved contexts (what we call Confidence from Answer Redundancy, i.e. CAR). Together these methods allow for a simple but effective way to defend against poisoning attacks that provides gains of nearly 20% exact match across varying levels of data poisoning/knowledge conflicts.

Defending Against Disinformation Attacks in Open-Domain Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) may hallucinate and generate fake information, despite pre-training on factual data. Inspired by the journalistic device of ``according to sources'', we propose according-to prompting: directing LLMs to ground responses against previously observed text. To quantify this grounding, we propose a novel evaluation metric (QUIP-Score) that measures the extent to which model-produced answers are directly found in underlying text corpora. We illustrate with experiments on three corpora (Wikipedia, PubMed, and the U.S. legal tax code) that these prompts improve grounding under our metrics, with the additional benefit of often improving end-task performance. Furthermore, prompts that ask the model to decrease grounding (or to ground to other corpora) indeed {decrease} QUIP-Score, indicating the ability of LLMs to increase or decrease grounded generations on request.

“According to . . . ”: Prompting Language Models Improves Quoting from Pre-Training Data

Using large language models (LMs) for query or document expansion can improve generalization in information retrieval. However, it is unknown whether these techniques are universally beneficial or only effective in specific settings, such as for particular retrieval models, dataset domains, or query types. To answer this, we conduct the first comprehensive analysis of LM-based expansion. We find that there exists a strong negative correlation between retriever performance and gains from expansion: expansion improves scores for weaker models, but generally harms stronger models. We show this trend holds across a set of eleven expansion techniques, twelve datasets with diverse distribution shifts, and twenty-four retrieval models. Through qualitative error analysis, we hypothesize that although expansions provide extra information (potentially improving recall), they add additional noise that makes it difficult to discern between the top relevant documents (thus introducing false positives). Our results suggest the following recipe: use expansions for weaker models or when the target dataset significantly differs from training corpus in format; otherwise, avoid expansions to keep the relevance signal clear.

Answering complex questions often requires multi-step reasoning in order to obtain the final answer. Most research into decompositions of complex questions involves open-domain systems, which have shown success in using these decompositions for improved retrieval. In the machine reading setting, however, work to understand when decompositions are helpful is understudied. We conduct experiments on decompositions in machine reading to unify recent work in this space, using a range of models and datasets. We find that decompositions can be helpful in zero or limited-data settings, giving several points of improvement in exact match. However, we also show that when models are given access to around a few hundred or more examples, decompositions are not helpful (and can actually be detrimental). Thus, our analysis implies that models can learn decompositions implicitly even with limited data.

When Do Decompositions Help for Machine Reading?

Since the advent of Federated Learning (FL), research has applied these methods to natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Despite a plethora of papers in FL for NLP, no previous works have studied how multilingual text impacts FL algorithms. Furthermore, multilingual text provides an interesting avenue to examine the impact of non-IID text (e.g. different languages) on FL in naturally occurring data. We explore three multilingual language tasks, language modeling, machine translation, and text classification using differing federated and non-federated learning algorithms. Our results show that using pretrained models reduces the negative effects of FL, helping them to perform near or better than centralized (no privacy) learning, even when using non-IID partitioning.

Pretrained Models for Multilingual Federated Learning

Code switching (CS) refers to the phenomenon of interchangeably using words and phrases from different languages. CS can pose significant accuracy challenges to NLP, due to the often monolingual nature of the underlying systems. In this work, we focus on CS in the context of English/Spanish conversations for the task of speech translation (ST), generating and evaluating both transcript and translation. To evaluate model performance on this task, we create a novel ST corpus derived from existing public data sets. We explore various ST architectures across two dimensions: cascaded (transcribe then translate) vs end-to-end (jointly transcribe and translate) and unidirectional (source -> target) vs bidirectional (source <-> target). We show that our ST architectures, and especially our bidirectional end-to-end architecture, perform well on CS speech, even when no CS training data is used.

End-to-End Speech Translation for Code Switched Speech

Transfer learning (TL) in natural language processing (NLP) has seen a surge of interest in recent years, as pre-trained models have shown an impressive ability to transfer to novel tasks. Three main strategies have emerged for making use of multiple supervised datasets during fine-tuning: training on an intermediate task before training on the target task (STILTs), using multi-task learning (MTL) to train jointly on a supplementary task and the target task (pairwise MTL), or simply using MTL to train jointly on all available datasets (MTL-ALL). In this work, we compare all three TL methods in a comprehensive analysis on the GLUE dataset suite. We find that there is a simple heuristic for when to use one of these techniques over the other: pairwise MTL is better than STILTs when the target task has fewer instances than the supporting task and vice versa. We show that this holds true in more than 92% of applicable cases on the GLUE dataset and validate this hypothesis with experiments varying dataset size. The simplicity and effectiveness of this heuristic is surprising and warrants additional exploration by the TL community. Furthermore, we find that MTL-ALL is worse than the pairwise methods in almost every case. We hope this study will aid others as they choose between TL methods for NLP tasks.

When to Use Multi-Task Learning vs Intermediate Fine-Tuning for Pre-Trained Encoder Transfer Learning

Text classification is a significant branch of natural language processing, and has many applications including document classification and sentiment analysis. Unsurprisingly, those who do text classification are concerned with the run-time of their algorithms, many of which depend on the size of the corpus' vocabulary due to their bag-of-words representation. Although many studies have examined the effect of preprocessing techniques on vocabulary size and accuracy, none have examined how these methods affect a model's run-time. To fill this gap, we provide a comprehensive study that examines how preprocessing techniques affect the vocabulary size, model performance, and model run-time, evaluating ten techniques over four models and two datasets. We show that some individual methods can reduce run-time with no loss of accuracy, while some combinations of methods can trade 2-5% of the accuracy for up to a 65% reduction of run-time. Furthermore, some combinations of preprocessing techniques can even provide a 15% reduction in run-time while simultaneously improving model accuracy.

Exploring the Relationship Between Algorithm Performance, Vocabulary, and Run-Time in Text Classification

This poster session includes Main Conference posters, Findings and Industry Track papers from the following areas:

Dialogue and Interactive Systems •  Semantics: Lexical, Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference and Other Areas •  Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond •  Information Retrieval and Text Mining

In-Person Poster Session E (Riverfront Hall)

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

[**Teleport to Gather**](https://app.gather.town/app/XDzSQW1b0mpTTAYr/EACL2024?spawnToken=PbTorasSRGWJnwuMOyM2) The WNUT workshop focuses on core NLP tasks (e.g., POS/NER tagging and translation; not computational social science) over user-generated text, such as that found on social media, web forums, online reviews, digital health records, or language learner essays.

We will have a best paper award. [**Read more**](https://noisy-text.github.io/2024/)
 [**Invited Speakers**](https://noisy-text.github.io/2024/#) **Program Overview** 
09:00 - 09:05 Opening Remarks 
09:05 - 10:00 Keynote: Yvette Graham 
10:00 - 10:30 Oral Session 1 
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break 
11:00 - 12:30 Poster Session 
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch 
14:00 - 15:00 Keynote: Jennifer Foster 
15:00 - 15:30 Oral Session 2 
15:30 - 16:00 Coffee Break 
16:00 - 17:00 Oral Session 3 [**Detailed Program**](https://noisy-text.github.io/2024/wnut2024-schedule.pdf)

W9: 9th Workshop on Noisy and User-generated Text (WNUT)

workshop paper

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Information Retrieval and Text Mining

technical paper

Question Answering

In-Person Poster and Demo Session B

In-Person Poster and Demo Session A

**Are you attending this poster session virtually?** 
In-person printed posters are available for in-person attendees only.
 
**Are you attending this poster session in person?** 
Hybrid posters are displayed in the East Foyer.

PS3 (In-person) Posters, Demo, Industry, Findings

**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.


**Tracks:** 
* Language Resources and Evaluation
* Multilinguality
* Summarization



Virtual PS4 - 8G: Group 16

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Posters: Resources and Evaluation

findings / work in progress

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

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 (NLP). 

Posters: Machine Learning for NLP

**Session Chair: ** Qingyao Ai

9B-Oral: Information Retrieval and Text Mining

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

**Whova App** 
Stay in touch with your fellow conference attendees via the [Whova App](https://whova.com/portal/webapp/nacon_202106/)

**Conference Structure**
https://2021.naacl.org/blog/conference-structure/

**Walkthrough video of how to NAACL 2021** 

Please take a moment to view this video explaining how to navigate the platform, attend sessions network with other attendees. 


<figure class="video_container">
 <iframe src="https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/crhwbGVh3vx?v=6&ff=1&title=0&controls=1" width=640 height=350 frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"> </iframe>
</figure>

Orion Weller

11

10

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Enhancing Systematic Decompositional Natural Language Inference Using Informal Logic

When do Generative Query and Document Expansions Fail? A Comprehensive Study Across Methods, Retrievers, and Datasets

NevIR: Negation in Neural Information Retrieval

Defending Against Disinformation Attacks in Open-Domain Question Answering

“According to . . . ”: Prompting Language Models Improves Quoting from Pre-Training Data

When do Generative Query and Document Expansions Fail? A Comprehensive Study Across Methods, Retrievers, and Datasets

When Do Decompositions Help for Machine Reading?

Pretrained Models for Multilingual Federated Learning

End-to-End Speech Translation for Code Switched Speech

When to Use Multi-Task Learning vs Intermediate Fine-Tuning for Pre-Trained Encoder Transfer Learning

Exploring the Relationship Between Algorithm Performance, Vocabulary, and Run-Time in Text Classification

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES