United States

Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Models (K-LLMs) system enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) abilities using external knowledge. Existing K-LLMs toolkits mainly focus on free-textual knowledge, lacking support for heterogeneous knowledge like tables and knowledge graphs, and fall short in comprehensive datasets, models, and user-friendly experience. To address this gap, we introduce KMatrix: a flexible heterogeneous knowledge enhancemant toolkit for LLMs including verbalizing-retrieval and parsing-query methods. Our modularity and control-logic flow diagram design flexibly supports the entire lifecycle of various complex K-LLMs systems, including training, evaluation, and deployment. To assist K-LLMs system research, a series of related knowledge, datasets, and models are integrated into our toolkit, along with performance analyses of K-LLMs systems enhanced by different types of knowledge. Using our toolkit, developers can rapidly build, evaluate, and deploy their own K-LLMs systems.

EMNLP 2024

KMatrix: A Flexible Heterogeneous Knowledge Enhancement Toolkit for Large Language Model

serving

easy-to-use

large model

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

demo

## 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 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.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive abilities in generating unstructured natural language according to instructions. However, their performance can be inconsistent when tasked with producing text that adheres to specific structured formats, which is crucial in applications like named entity recognition (NER) or relation extraction (RE). To address this issue, this paper introduces an efficient method, G&O, to enhance their structured text generation capabilities. It breaks the generation into a two-step pipeline: initially, LLMs generate answers in natural language as intermediate responses. Subsequently, LLMs are asked to organize the output into the desired structure, using the intermediate responses as context. G&O effectively separates the generation of content from the structuring process, reducing the pressure of completing two orthogonal tasks simultaneously. Tested on zero-shot NER and RE, the results indicate a significant improvement in LLM performance with minimal additional efforts. This straightforward and adaptable prompting technique can also be combined with other strategies, like self-consistency, to further elevate LLM capabilities in various structured text generation tasks.

A Simple but Effective Approach to Improve Structured Language Model Output for Information Extraction

Automatic generation of graphical layouts is crucial for many real-world applications, including designing posters, flyers, advertisements, and graphical user interfaces. Given the incredible ability of Large language models (LLMs) in both natural language understanding and generation, we believe that we could customize an LLM to help people create compelling graphical layouts starting with only text instructions from the user. We call our method TextLap (text-based layout planning). It uses a curated instruction-based layout planning dataset (InsLap) to customize LLMs as a graphic designer. Human annotators are asked to build a benchmark to evaluate different layout planning models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TextLap and show that it outperforms strong baselines, including GPT-4 based methods, for document generation and graphical design benchmarks.

Customizing Language Models for Text-to-Layout Planning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used in both industry and academia for various tasks, yet evaluating the consistency of generated text responses continues to be a challenge. Traditional metrics like ROUGE and BLEU show a weak correlation with human judgment. More sophisticated metrics using Natural Language Inference (NLI) have shown improved correlations but are complex to implement, require domain-specific training due to poor cross-domain generalization, and lack explainability. More recently, prompt-based metrics using LLMs as evaluators have emerged; while they are easier to implement, they still lack explainability and depend on task-specific prompts, which limits their generalizability. This work introduces Automated eXplainable Consistency Evaluation using LLMs (AXCEL), a prompt-based consistency metric which offers explanations for the consistency scores by providing detailed reasoning and pinpointing inconsistent text spans. AXCEL is also a generalizable metric which can be adopted to multiple tasks without changing the prompt. AXCEL outperforms both non-prompt and prompt-based state-of-the-art (SOTA) metrics in detecting inconsistencies across summarization by 8.7%, free text generation by 6.2%, and data-to-text conversion tasks by 29.4%. We also evaluate the influence of underlying LLMs on prompt based metric performance and recalibrate the SOTA prompt-based metrics with the latest LLMs for fair comparison. Further, we show that AXCEL demonstrates strong performance using open source LLMs.

AXCEL: Automated eXplainable Consistency Evaluation using LLMs

The quality of the dataset is crucial for ensuring optimal performance and reliability of downstream task models. However, datasets often contain noisy data inadvertently included during the construction process. Numerous attempts have been made to correct this issue through human annotators. However, hiring and managing human annotators is expensive and time-consuming. As an alternative, recent studies are exploring the use of large language models (LLMs) for data annotation.

In this study, we present a case study that extends the application of LLM-based data annotation to enhance the quality of existing datasets through a cleansing strategy. Specifically, we leverage approaches such as chain-of-thought and majority voting to imitate human annotation and classify unrelated documents from the Multi-News dataset, which is widely used for the multi-document summarization task. Through our proposed cleansing method, we introduce an enhanced Multi-News+. By employing LLMs for data cleansing, we demonstrate an efficient and effective approach to improving dataset quality without relying on expensive human annotation efforts.

Multi-News+: Cost-efficient Dataset Cleansing via LLM-based Data Annotation

Ensuring that the benefits of sign language technologies are distributed equitably among all community members is crucial. Thus, it is important to address potential biases and inequities that may arise from the design or use of these resources. Crowd-sourced sign language datasets, such as the ASL Citizen dataset, are great resources for improving accessibility and preserving linguistic diversity, but they must be used thoughtfully to avoid reinforcing existing biases.

In this work, we utilize the rich information about participant demographics and lexical features present in the ASL Citizen dataset to study and document the biases that may result from models trained on crowd-sourced sign datasets. Further, we apply several bias mitigation techniques during model training, and find that these techniques reduce performance disparities without decreasing accuracy. With the publication of this work, we release the demographic information about the participants in the ASL Citizen dataset to encourage future bias mitigation work in this space.

Studying and Mitigating Biases in Sign Language Understanding Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in instruction-following, making them increasingly integral to various applications. However, this capability introduces the risk of prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions are embedded in the input to trigger unintended actions or content. Understanding the robustness of LLMs against such attacks is critical for ensuring their safe deployment. In this work, we establish a benchmark to evaluate the robustness of instruction-following LLMs against prompt injection attacks, assessing their ability to discern which instructions to follow and which to disregard. Through extensive experiments with leading instruction-following LLMs, we reveal significant vulnerabilities, particularly in models that mis-follow injected instructions. Our results show that certain models are excessively inclined to prioritize embedded instructions in prompts, often focusing on the latter parts of the prompt without fully understanding the overall context. Conversely, models that exhibit stronger contextual understanding and instruction-following capabilities tend to be more easily compromised by injected instructions. These findings highlight the need to balance improving LLMs' instruction-following abilities with enhancing their overall comprehension of prompts, to prevent mis-following inappropriate instructions. We hope our analysis provides valuable insights into these vulnerabilities, contributing to the development of more robust solutions in the future.

Evaluating the Instruction-Following Robustness of Large Language Models to Prompt Injection

In this paper, we apply a method to quantify biases associated with named entities from various countries. We create counterfactual examples with small perturbations on target-domain data instead of relying on templates or specific datasets for bias detection. On widely used classifiers for subjectivity analysis, including sentiment, emotion, hate speech, and offensive text using Twitter data, our results demonstrate positive biases related to the language spoken in a country across all classifiers studied. Notably, the presence of certain country names in a sentence can strongly influence predictions, up to a 23% change in hate speech detection and up to a 60% change in the prediction of negative emotions such as anger. We hypothesize that these biases stem from the training data of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and find correlations between affect predictions and PLMs likelihood in English and unknown languages like Basque and Maori, revealing distinct patterns with exacerbate correlations. Further, we followed these correlations in-between counterfactual examples from a same sentence to remove the syntactical component, uncovering interesting results suggesting the impact of the pre-training data was more important for English-speaking-country names.

A Study of Nationality Bias in Names and Perplexity using Off-the-Shelf Affect-related Tweet Classifiers

Warning: this paper contains content that may be inappropriate or offensive.

As generative models become available for public use in various applications, testing and analyzing vulnerabilities of these models has become a priority. In this work, we propose an automatic red teaming framework that evaluates a given black-box model and exposes its vulnerabilities against unsafe and inappropriate content generation. Our framework uses in-context learning in a feedback loop to red team models and trigger them into unsafe content generation. In particular, taking text-to-image models as target models, we explore different feedback mechanisms to automatically learn effective and diverse adversarial prompts. Our experiments demonstrate that even with enhanced safety features, Stable Diffusion (SD) models are vulnerable to our adversarial prompts, raising concerns on their robustness in practical uses. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective for red teaming text-to-text models.

FLIRT: Feedback Loop In-context Red Teaming

Despite recent advances in LLM quantization, activation quantization remains to be challenging due to the activation outliers. Conventional remedies, e.g., mixing precisions for different channels, introduce extra overhead and reduce the speedup. In this work, we develop a simple yet effective strategy to facilitate per-tensor activation quantization by preventing the generation of problematic tokens. Precisely, we propose a method to find a set of key-value cache, coined _CushionCache_, which mitigates outliers in subsequent tokens when inserted as a prefix. CushionCache works in two steps: First, we greedily search for a prompt token sequence that minimizes the maximum activation values in subsequent tokens. Then, we further tune the token cache to regularize the activations of subsequent tokens to be more quantization-friendly. The proposed method successfully addresses activation outliers of LLMs, providing a substantial performance boost for per-tensor activation quantization methods. We thoroughly evaluate our method over a wide range of models and benchmarks and find that it significantly surpasses the established baseline of per-tensor W8A8 quantization and can be seamlessly integrated with the recent activation quantization method.

Prefixing Attention Sinks can Mitigate Activation Outliers for Large Language Model Quantization

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) offers interpretable semantic components of embeddings.
While ICA theory assumes that embeddings can be linearly decomposed into independent components, real-world data often do not satisfy this assumption. Consequently, non-independencies remain between the estimated components, which ICA cannot eliminate. We quantified these non-independencies using higher-order correlations and demonstrated that when the higher-order correlation between two components is large, it indicates a strong semantic association between them, along with many words sharing common meanings with both components. The entire structure of non-independencies was visualized using a maximum spanning tree of semantic components. These findings provide deeper insights into embeddings through ICA.

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A Simple but Effective Approach to Improve Structured Language Model Output for Information Extraction

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