While coreference resolution is traditionally used as a component in individual document understanding, in this work we take a more global view and explore what can we learn about a domain from the set of all document-level coreference relations that are present in a large corpus. We derive coreference chains from a corpus of 30 million biomedical abstracts and construct a graph based on the string phrases within these chains, establishing connections between phrases if they co-occur within the same coreference chain. We then use the graph structure and the betweeness centrality measure to distinguish between edges denoting hierarchy, identity and noise, assign directionality to edges denoting hierarchy, and split nodes (strings) that correspond to multiple distinct concepts. The result is a rich, data-driven ontology over concepts in the biomedical domain, parts of which overlaps significantly with human-authored ontologies. We release the coreference chains and resulting ontology under a creative-commons license.

Data-driven Coreference-based Ontology Building

Document collections of various domains, e.g., legal, medical, or financial, often share some underlying collection-wide structure, which captures information that can aid both human users and structure-aware models.
We propose to identify the typical structure of document within a collection, which requires to capture recurring topics across the collection, while abstracting over arbitrary header paraphrases, and ground each topic to respective document locations. 
These requirements pose several challenges: headers that mark recurring topics frequently differ in phrasing, certain section headers are unique to individual documents and do not reflect the typical structure, and the order of topics can vary between documents. 
Subsequently, we develop an unsupervised graph-based method which leverages both inter- and intra-document similarities, to extract the underlying collection-wide structure. 
Our evaluations on three diverse domains in both English and Hebrew indicate that our method extracts meaningful collection-wide structure, and we hope that future work will leverage our method for multi-document applications and structure-aware models.

Leveraging Collection-Wide Similarities for Unsupervised Document Structure Extraction

The escalating debate on AI's capabilities warrants developing reliable metrics to assess machine "intelligence." Recently, many anecdotal examples were used to suggest that newer Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 exhibit Neural Theory-of-Mind (N-ToM); however, prior work reached conflicting conclusions regarding those abilities. We investigate the extent of LLMs' N-ToM through an extensive evaluation of 6 tasks and find that while LLMs exhibit certain N-ToM abilities, this behavior is far from being robust. We further examine the factors impacting performance on N-ToM tasks and discover that LLMs struggle with adversarial examples, indicating reliance on shallow heuristics rather than robust ToM abilities. We caution against drawing conclusions from anecdotal examples, limited benchmark testing, and using human-designed psychological tests to evaluate models.

Clever Hans or Neural Theory of Mind? Stress Testing Social Reasoning in Large Language Models

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

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

Recent applications of LLMs in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) systems have shown impressive results, but the use of shortcuts, mechanisms triggered by features spuriously correlated to the true label, has emerged as a potential threat to their reliability. We analyze the problem from two angles: LLMs as editors, guided to edit text to mislead LLMs; and LLMs as readers, who answer questions based on the edited text. We introduce a framework that guides an editor to add potential shortcuts-triggers to samples. Using GPT4 as the editor, we find it can successfully edit trigger shortcut in samples that fool LLMs. Analysing LLMs as readers, we observe that even capable LLMs can be deceived using shortcut knowledge. Strikingly, we discover that GPT4 can be deceived by its own edits (15% drop in F1). Our findings highlight inherent vulnerabilities of LLMs to shortcut manipulations. We publish ShortcutQA, a curated dataset generated by our framework for future research.

Guiding LLM to Fool Itself: Automatically Manipulating Machine Reading Comprehension Shortcut Triggers

Recent applications of LLMs in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) systems have shown impressive results, but the use of shortcuts, mechanisms triggered by features spuriously correlated to the true label, has emerged as a potential threat to their reliability. We analyze the problem from two angles: LLMs as editors, guided to edit text to mislead LLMs; and LLMs as readers, who answer questions based on the edited text.
We introduce a framework that guides an editor to add potential shortcuts-triggers to samples.
Using GPT4 as the editor, we find it can successfully edit trigger shortcut in samples that fool LLMs. Analysing LLMs as readers, we observe that even capable LLMs can be deceived using shortcut knowledge. Strikingly, we discover that GPT4 can be deceived by its own edits (15% drop in F1).
Our findings highlight inherent vulnerabilities of LLMs to shortcut manipulations. We publish ShortcutQA, a curated dataset generated by our framework for future research.

Guiding LLM to Fool Itself: Automatically Imbuing Multiple Shortcut Triggers in Question Answering Samples

Motivated by the question of the extent to which large language models "understand" social intelligence, we investigate the ability of such models to generate correct responses to questions involving descriptions of faux pas situations. The faux pas test is a test used in clinical psychology, which is known to be more challenging for children than individual tests of theory-of-mind or social intelligence. Our results demonstrate that, while the models seem to sometimes offer correct responses, they in fact struggle with this task, and that many of the seemingly correct responses can be attributed to over-interpretation by the human reader ("the ELIZA effect"). An additional phenomenon observed is the failure of most models to generate a correct response to presupposition questions. Finally, in an experiment in which the models are tasked with generating original faux pas stories, we find that while some models are capable of generating novel faux pas stories, the stories are all explicit, as the models are limited in their abilities to describe situations in an implicit manner.

How Well do Large Language Models Perform on Faux Pas Tests?

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

Verbal omissions are complex syntactic phenomena in VP coordination structures. They occur when verbs and (some of) their arguments are omitted from subsequent clauses after being explicitly stated in an initial clause. Recovering these omitted elements is necessary for accurate interpretation of the sentence, and while humans easily and intuitively fill in the missing information, state-of-the-art models continue to struggle with this task. Previous work is limited to small-scale datasets, synthetic data creation methods, and to resolution methods in the dependency-graph level. In this work we propose a {\em conjunct resolution} task that operates directly on the text and makes use of a {\em split-and-rephrase} paradigm in order to recover the missing elements in the coordination structure. To this end, we first formulate a pragmatic framework of verbal omissions which describes the different types of omissions, and develop an automatic scalable collection method. Based on this method, we curate a large dataset, containing over 10K examples of naturally-occurring verbal omissions with crowd-sourced annotations of the resolved conjuncts. We train various neural baselines for this task, and show that while our best method obtains decent performance, it leaves ample space for improvement. We propose our dataset, metrics and models as a starting point for future research on this topic.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/eX4PwSmcCc1EvCqjxcYdKB/embed/polls/5ec17bb9-70a1-419b-af27-31ec90bcf8b4" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Conjunct Resolution in the Face of Verbal Omissions

Linear methods for erasing human-interpretable concepts from neural representations were found tractable and useful.However, the impact of this removal on the behavior of classifiers trained on the modified representations is not fully understood.In this work, we formally define the notion of linear guardedness as the inability of an adversary to predict the concept directly from the representation and study its implications.We show that, in the binary case, an additional linear layer cannot recover the erased concept.However, we demonstrate that multiclass softmax classifiers can be constructed that indirectly recover the concept, pointing to the inherent limitations of linear guardedness as a bias mitigation technique.These findings shed light on the theoretical limitations of linear information removal methods and highlight the need for further research on the connections between intrinsic and extrinsic bias in neural models.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/eX4PwSmcCc1EvCqjxcYdKB/embed/polls/f44b96ca-a3d7-46ad-bea6-5de84fdfaf93" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Linear Guardedness and its Implications

Language models generate text based on successively sampling the next word. A decoding procedure based on nucleus (top-$p$) sampling chooses from the smallest possible set of words whose cumulative probability exceeds the probability $p$. In this work, we assess whether a top-$p$ set is indeed aligned with its probabilistic meaning in various linguistic contexts.We employ conformal prediction, a calibration procedure that focuses on the construction of minimal prediction sets according to a desired confidence level, to calibrate the parameter $p$ as a function of the entropy of the next word distribution. We find that OPT models are overconfident, and that calibration shows a moderate inverse scaling with model size.

Conformal Nucleus Sampling

How Well Do Large Language Models Perform on Faux Pas Tests?

To produce accurate predictions, language models (LMs) must balance between generalization and memorization. Yet, little is known about the mechanism by which transformer LMs employ their memorization capacity. When does a model decide to output a memorized phrase, and how is this phrase then retrieved from memory? In this work, we offer the first methodological framework for probing and characterizing recall of memorized sequences in transformer LMs. First, we lay out criteria for detecting model inputs that trigger memory recall, and propose idioms as inputs that typically fulfill these criteria. Next, we construct a dataset of English idioms and use it to compare model behavior on memorized vs. non-memorized inputs. Specifically, we analyze the internal prediction construction process by interpreting the model's hidden representations as a gradual refinement of the output probability distribution. We find that across different model sizes and architectures, memorized predictions are a two-step process: early layers promote the predicted token to the top of the output distribution, and upper layers increase model confidence. This suggests that memorized information is stored and retrieved in the early layers of the network. Last, we demonstrate the utility of our methodology beyond idioms in memorized factual statements. Overall, our work makes a first step towards understanding memory recall, and provides a methodological basis for future studies of transformer memorization.

Understanding Transformer Memorization Recall Through Idioms

Current state-of-the-art coreference systems are based on a single pairwise scoring component, which assigns to each pair of mention spans a score reflecting their tendency to corefer to each other. We observe that different kinds of mention pairs require different information sources to assess their score. We present LingMess, a linguistically motivated categorization of mention-pairs into 6 types of coreference decisions and learn a dedicated trainable scoring function for each category. This significantly improves the accuracy of the pairwise scorer as well as of the overall coreference performance on the English Ontonotes coreference corpus and 5 additional datasets.

LingMess: Linguistically Informed Multi Expert Scorers for Coreference Resolution

We propose a new commonsense reasoning benchmark to motivate commonsense reasoning progress from two perspectives: (1) Evaluating whether models can distinguish knowledge quality by predicting if the knowledge is enough to answer the question; (2) Evaluating whether models can develop commonsense inference capabilities that generalize across tasks. We first extract supporting knowledge for each question and ask humans to annotate whether the auto-extracted knowledge is enough to answer the question or not. After that, we convert different tasks into a unified question-answering format to evaluate the models' generalization capabilities. We name the benchmark Commonsense Inference with Knowledge-in-the-loop Question Answering (\name). Experiments show that with our learning paradigm, models demonstrate encouraging generalization capabilities. At the same time, we also notice that distinguishing knowledge quality remains challenging for current commonsense reasoning models.

CIKQA: Learning Commonsense Inference with a Unified Knowledge-in-the-loop QA Paradigm

This poster session includes Main Conference posters and Findings from the following areas:

Speech Processing and Spoken Language Understanding •  Resources and Evaluation • Human-centered NLP • NLP Applications

In-Person Poster Session D (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.

Findings In-Person Poster Session 1

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.aclweb.org/registration). **

If you have already registered, please check your inbox for an email from Underline granting you access to ACL 2024 content.

ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Linguistic Theory and Insights

technical 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.

**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.

PS5 (GatherTown) 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.

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

**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.

PS4 (In-person) Posters, Demo, Industry, Findings

**Workshop Organizers:** ‎‎Najoung Kim, Yiding Hao, Jaap Jumelet, Hosein Mohebbi, Yonatan Belinkov and Arya D. McCarthy
 *Coffee Break 10:30 am* 
*Lunch Break 12:30 pm* 
*Coffee Break 3:30 pm* [**Workshop Website**](https://blackboxnlp.github.io/) The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers focused on interpreting and explaining NLP models by taking inspiration from fields such as machine learning, psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. We hope the workshop will serve as an interdisciplinary meetup that allows for cross-collaboration. [**Invited Speakers**](https://blackboxnlp.github.io/)
 [**Go to Gather**](https://app.gather.town/app/ROH1myZvp9ba7a3C/EMNLP2023?spawnToken=aK5bTdG4Q_S9rpKXfq1O)

W14: BlackboxNLP 2023: The 6th Workshop on Analysing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP

workshop paper

### [Program](https://sites.google.com/view/sicon-2023/program)
Social influence is the change in an individual's thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behaviors that results from interaction with another individual or a group. For example, a buyer uses social influence skills to engage in trade-offs and build rapport when bargaining with a seller. A therapist uses social influence skills like persuasion to motivate a patient towards physical exercise. Social influence is a core function of human communication, and such scenarios are ubiquitous in everyday life, from negotiations to argumentation to behavioral interventions. Consequently, realistic human-machine conversations must reflect these social influence dynamics, making it essential to systematically model and understand them in dialogue research. This requires perspectives not only from NLP and AI research but also from game theory, emotion, communication, and psychology. For more details visit our workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/sicon-2023/home
#### [Visit GatherTown](https://app.gather.town/app/5OscLswEEuYf2Psb/ACL2023)

W18: The 1st Workshop on Social Influence in Conversations (SICon)

### 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.

Findings papers without presentation slot

Poster Session 7

Poster Session 6

Virtual Poster Session 2

Virtual Poster Session 1

Poster Session 4

### Welcome to the 17th 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 had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. 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.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

Please feel free to view the Findings papers at your convenience. You are welcome to leave your comment or a question in the Chat box.

Yoav Goldberg

43

42

1

SHORT BIO

Presentations