Thailand

Machine translation is used in e-commerce to translate second-language queries into the primary language of the store, to be matched by the search system against the product catalog. However, many queries contain spelling mistakes. We first present an analysis of the spelling-robustness of a population of MT systems, quantifying how spelling variations affect MT output, the list of returned products, and ultimately user behavior. We then present two sets of practical experiments illustrating how spelling-robustness may be specifically improved. For MT, reducing the number of BPE operations significantly improves spelling-robustness in six language pairs. In end-to-end e-commerce, the inclusion of a dedicated spelling correction model, and the augmentation of that model&#39;s training data with language-relevant phenomena, each improve robustness and consistency of search results.

ACL 2024

Impacts of Misspelled Queries on Translation and Product Search

byte-pair encoding

spelling correction

e-commerce

data augmentation

robustness

machine translation

**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

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EMNLP 2023

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

Machine translation is used in e-commerce to translate second-language queries into the primary language of the store, to be matched by the search system against the product catalog. However, many queries contain spelling mistakes. We first present an analysis of the spelling-robustness of a population of MT systems, quantifying how spelling variations affect MT output, the list of returned products, and ultimately user behavior. We then present two sets of practical experiments illustrating how spelling-robustness may be specifically improved. For MT, reducing the number of BPE operations significantly improves spelling-robustness in six language pairs. In end-to-end e-commerce, the inclusion of a dedicated spelling correction model, and the augmentation of that model's training data with language-relevant phenomena, each improve robustness and consistency of search results.

poster

### 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.

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Please register!

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.

Numerous recent works aim to enhance the efficacy of Large Language Models (LLMs) through strategic prompting. In particular, the Optimization by PROmpting (OPRO) approach provides state-of-the-art performance by leveraging LLMs as optimizers where the optimization task is to find instructions that maximize the task accuracy. In this paper, we revisit OPRO for automated prompting with relatively small-scale LLMs, such as LLaMa-2 family and Mistral 7B. Our investigation reveals that OPRO shows limited effectiveness in small-scale LLMs, with limited inference capabilities constraining optimization ability. We suggest future automatic prompting engineering to consider both model capabilities and computational costs. Additionally, for small-scale LLMs, we recommend direct instructions that clearly outline objectives and methodologies as robust prompt baselines, ensuring efficient and effective prompt engineering in ongoing research.

Revisiting OPRO: The Limitations of Small-Scale LLMs as Optimizers

Backdoor attacks pose an increasingly severe security threat to Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) during their development stage. In response, backdoor sample purification has emerged as a promising defense mechanism, aiming to eliminate backdoor triggers while preserving the integrity of the clean content in the samples. However, existing approaches have been predominantly focused on the word space, which are ineffective against feature-space triggers and significantly impair performance on clean data. To address this, we introduce a universal backdoor defense that purifies backdoor samples in the activation space by drawing abnormal activations towards optimized minimum clean activation distribution intervals. The advantages of our approach are twofold: (1) By operating in the activation space, our method captures from surface-level information like words to higher-level semantic concepts such as syntax, thus counteracting diverse triggers; (2) the fine-grained continuous nature of the activation space allows for more precise preservation of clean content while removing triggers. Furthermore, we propose a detection module based on statistical information of abnormal activations, to achieve a better trade-off between clean accuracy and defending performance. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets and against diverse attacks (including syntax and style attacks) demonstrate that our defense achieves state-of-the-art performance.

BadActs: A Universal Backdoor Defense in the Activation Space

Knowledge in the real world is being updated constantly. However, it is costly to frequently update large language models (LLMs). Therefore, it is crucial for LLMs to understand the concept of temporal knowledge. However, prior works on temporal question answering (TQA) did not emphasize multi-answer and multi-hop types of temporal reasoning. In this paper, we propose a complex temporal question-answering dataset Complex-TR that focuses on multi-answer and multi-hop temporal reasoning. Besides, we also propose a novel data augmentation strategy to improve the complex temporal reasoning capability and robustness of LLMs. We conducted experiments on multiple temporal QA datasets. Experimental results show that our method is able to improve LLMs' performance on temporal QA benchmarks by significant margins.

Towards Robust Temporal Reasoning of Large Language Models via a Multi-Hop QA Dataset and Pseudo-Instruction Tuning

Creating effective and reliable task-oriented dialog systems (ToDSs) is challenging, not only because of the complex structure of these systems, but also due to the scarcity of training data, especially when several modules need to be trained separately, each one with its own input/output training examples. Data augmentation (DA), whereby synthetic training examples are added to the training data, has been successful in other NLP systems, but has not been explored as extensively in ToDSs. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of DA methods in an end-to-end ToDS setting, where a single system is trained to handle all processing stages, from user inputs to system outputs. We experiment with two ToDSs (UBAR, GALAXY) on two datasets (MultiWOZ, KVRET). We consider three types of DA methods (word-level, sentence-level, dialog-level), comparing eight DA methods that have shown promising results in ToDSs and other NLP systems. We show that all DA methods considered are beneficial, and we highlight the best ones, also providing advice to practitioners. We also introduce a more challenging few-shot cross-domain ToDS setting, reaching similar conclusions.

Comparing Data Augmentation Methods for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

When first deploying an anomaly detection system, e.g., to detect out-of-scope queries in chatbots, there are no observed data, making data-driven approaches ineffective. Zero-shot anomaly detection methods offer a solution to such "cold-start" cases, but unfortunately they are often not accurate enough. This paper studies the realistic but underexplored $\textit{cold-start}$ setting where an anomaly detection model is initialized using zero-shot guidance, but subsequently receives a small number of contaminated observations (namely, that may include anomalies). The goal is to make efficient use of both the zero-shot guidance and the observations. We propose ColdFusion, a method that effectively adapts the zero-shot anomaly detector to contaminated observations. To support future development of this new setting, we propose an evaluation suite consisting of evaluation protocols and metrics.

From Zero to Hero: Cold-Start Anomaly Detection

Effective interlocutors account for the uncertain goals, beliefs, and emotions of others. But even the best human conversationalist cannot perfectly anticipate the trajectory of a dialogue. How well can language models represent inherent uncertainty in conversations? We propose FortUne Dial, an expansion of the long-standing ``conversation forecasting'' task: instead of just accuracy, evaluation is conducted with uncertainty-aware metrics, effectively enabling abstention on individual instances. We study two ways in which language models potentially represent outcome uncertainty (internally, using scores and directly, using tokens) and propose fine-tuning strategies to improve calibration of both representations. Experiments on eight difficult negotiation corpora demonstrate that our proposed fine-tuning strategies (a traditional supervision strategy and an off-policy reinforcement learning strategy) can calibrate smaller open-source models to compete with pre-trained models 10x their size.

Deal, or no deal (or who knows)? Forecasting Uncertainty in Conversations using Large Language Models

Benchmarks have been essential for driving progress in machine learning. A better understanding of LLM capabilities on real world tasks is vital for safe development.
Designing adequate LLM benchmarks is challenging: Data from real-world tasks is hard to collect, public availability of static evaluation data results in test data contamination and benchmark overfitting, and periodically generating new evaluation data is tedious and may result in temporally inconsistent results. 
We introduce HelloFresh, based on continuous streams of real-world data generated by intrinsically motivated human labelers. 
It covers recent events from X (formerly Twitter) community notes and edits of Wikipedia pages, mitigating the risk of test data contamination and benchmark overfitting.
Any X user can propose an X note to add additional context to a misleading post (formerly tweet); if the community classifies it as helpful, it is shown with the post. 
Similarly, Wikipedia relies on community-based consensus, allowing users to edit articles or revert edits made by other users.
Verifying whether an X note is helpful or whether a Wikipedia edit should be accepted are hard tasks that require grounding by querying the web.
We backtest state-of-the-art LLMs supplemented with simple web search access and find that HelloFresh yields a temporally consistent ranking.
To enable continuous evaluation on Hellofresh, we host a public leaderboard and periodically updated evaluation data at https://tinyurl.com/hello-fresh-LLM.

HelloFresh: LLM Evalutions on Streams of Real-World Human Editorial Actions across X Community Notes and Wikipedia edits

Data scarcity and the modality gap between the speech and text modalities are two major obstacles of end-to-end Speech Translation (ST) systems, thus hindering their performance. Prior work has attempted to mitigate these challenges by leveraging external MT data and optimizing distance metrics that bring closer the speech-text representations. However, achieving competitive results typically requires some ST data. For this reason, we introduce ZeroSwot, a method for zero-shot ST that bridges the modality gap without any paired ST data. Leveraging a novel CTC compression and Optimal Transport, we train a speech encoder using only ASR data, to align with the representation space of a massively multilingual MT model. The speech encoder seamlessly integrates with the MT model at inference, enabling direct translation from speech to text, across all languages supported by the MT model. Our experiments show that we can effectively close the modality gap without ST data, while our results on MuST-C and CoVoST demonstrate our method's superiority over not only previous zero-shot models, but also supervised ones, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Pushing the Limits of Zero-shot End-to-End Speech Translation

We propose a novel VQA dataset, BloomVQA, to facilitate comprehensive evaluation of large vision-language models on comprehension tasks. Unlike current benchmarks that often focus on fact-based memorization and simple reasoning tasks without theoretical grounding, we collect multiple-choice samples based on picture stories that reflect different levels of comprehension, as laid out in Bloom's Taxonomy, a classic framework for learning assessment widely adopted in education research. Our data maps to a novel hierarchical graph representation which enables automatic data augmentation and novel measures characterizing model consistency. We perform graded evaluation and reliability analysis on recent multi-modal models. In comparison to low-level tasks, we observe decreased performance on tasks requiring advanced comprehension and cognitive skills with up to 38.0% drop in VQA accuracy. In comparison to earlier models, GPT-4V demonstrates improved accuracy over all comprehension levels and also shows a tendency of bypassing visual inputs especially for higher-level tasks. Current models also show consistency patterns misaligned with human comprehension in various scenarios, demonstrating the need for improvement based on theoretically-grounded criteria. The dataset can be accessed at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ygong/BloomVQA.

BloomVQA: Assessing Hierarchical Multi-modal Comprehension

Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) reasoning has two settings: interpolation reasoning and extrapolation reasoning. Both of them draw plenty of research interest and have great significance. Methods of the former de-emphasize the temporal correlations among facts sequences, while methods of the latter require strict chronological order of knowledge and ignore inferring clues provided by missing facts of the past. These limit the practicability of TKG applications as almost all of the existing TKG reasoning methods are designed specifically to address either one setting. To this end, this paper proposes an original Temporal PAth-based Reasoning (TPAR) model for both the interpolation and extrapolation reasoning settings. TPAR performs a neural-driven symbolic reasoning fashion that is robust to ambiguous and noisy temporal data, and with fine interpretability as well. Comprehensive experiments show that TPAR outperforms SOTA methods on the link prediction task for both the interpolation and the extrapolation settings. A novel pipeline experimental setting is designed to evaluate the performances of SOTA combinations and the proposed TPAR towards interpolation and extrapolation reasoning. And more diverse experiments are conducted to show the robustness and interpretability of TPAR.

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Revisiting OPRO: The Limitations of Small-Scale LLMs as Optimizers

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Multi-teacher Distillation for Multilingual Spelling Correction