United States

Large language models are able to generate code for visualisations in response to simple user requests.
This is a useful application and an appealing one for NLP research because plots of data provide grounding for language.
However, there are relatively few benchmarks, and those that exist may not be representative of what users do in practice.
This paper investigates whether benchmarks reflect real-world use through an empirical study comparing benchmark datasets with code from public repositories.
Our findings reveal a substantial gap, with evaluations not testing the same distribution of chart types, attributes, and actions as real-world examples.
One dataset is representative, but requires extensive modification to become a practical end-to-end benchmark. 
This shows that new benchmarks are needed to support the development of systems that truly address users&#39; visualisation needs.
These observations will guide future data creation, highlighting which features hold genuine significance for users.

EMNLP 2024

Do Text-to-Vis Benchmarks Test Real Use of Visualizations?

vocabulary expansion

domain-specific llms

nlp application

# 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). 

Large language models are able to generate code for visualisations in response to simple user requests.
This is a useful application and an appealing one for NLP research because plots of data provide grounding for language.
However, there are relatively few benchmarks, and those that exist may not be representative of what users do in practice.
This paper investigates whether benchmarks reflect real-world use through an empirical study comparing benchmark datasets with code from public repositories.
Our findings reveal a substantial gap, with evaluations not testing the same distribution of chart types, attributes, and actions as real-world examples.
One dataset is representative, but requires extensive modification to become a practical end-to-end benchmark. 
This shows that new benchmarks are needed to support the development of systems that truly address users' visualisation needs.
These observations will guide future data creation, highlighting which features hold genuine significance for users.

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 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.

Recent developments in large speech foundation models like Whisper have led to their widespread use in many automatic speech recognition (ASR) applications. These systems incorporate 'special tokens' in their vocabulary, such as $<|\texttt{endoftext}|>$, to guide their language generation process. However, we demonstrate that these tokens can be exploited by adversarial attacks to manipulate the model's behavior. We propose a simple yet effective method to learn a universal acoustic realization of Whisper's $<|\texttt{endoftext}|>$ token, which, when prepended to any speech signal, encourages the model to ignore the speech and only transcribe the special token, effectively 'muting' the model. Our experiments demonstrate that the same, universal 0.64-second adversarial audio segment can successfully mute a target Whisper ASR model for over 97% of speech samples. Moreover, we find that this universal adversarial audio segment often transfers to new datasets and tasks. Overall this work demonstrates the vulnerability of Whisper models to `muting' adversarial attacks, where such attacks can pose both risks and potential benefits in real-world settings: for example the attack can be used to bypass speech moderation systems, or conversely the attack can also be used to protect private speech data.

Muting Whisper: A Universal Acoustic Adversarial Attack on Speech Foundation Models

Planning, as the core module of agents, is crucial in various fields such as embodied agents, web navigation, and tool using. With the development of large language models (LLMs), some researchers treat large language models as intelligent agents to stimulate and evaluate their planning capabilities. However, the planning mechanism is still unclear. In this work, we focus on exploring the look-ahead planning mechanism in large language models from the perspectives of information flow and internal representations. First, we study how planning is done internally by analyzing the multi-layer perception (MLP) and multi-head self-attention (MHSA) components at the last token. We find that the output of MHSA in the middle layers at the last token can directly decode the decision to some extent. Based on this discovery, we further trace the source of MHSA by information flow, and we reveal that MHSA extracts information from spans of the goal states and recent steps. According to information flow, we continue to study what information is encoded within it. Specifically, we explore whether future decisions have been considered in advance in the representation of flow. We demonstrate that the middle and upper layers encode a few short-term future decisions. Overall, our research analyzes the look-ahead planning mechanisms of LLMs, facilitating future research on LLMs performing planning tasks.

Unlocking the Future: Exploring Look-Ahead Planning Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models

While recent advances in Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology produce natural and expressive speech, they lack the option for users to select emotion and control intensity. We propose EmoKnob, a framework that allows fine-grained emotion control in speech synthesis with few-shot demonstrative samples of arbitrary emotion. Our framework leverages the expressive speaker representation space made possible by recent advances in foundation voice cloning models. Based on the few-shot capability of our emotion control framework, we propose two methods to apply emotion control on emotions described by open-ended text, enabling an intuitive interface for controlling a diverse array of nuanced emotions. To facilitate a more systematic emotional speech synthesis field, we introduce a set of evaluation metrics designed to rigorously assess the faithfulness and recognizability of emotion control frameworks. Through objective and subjective evaluations, we show that our emotion control framework effectively embeds emotions into speech and surpasses emotion expressiveness of commercial TTS services.

EmoKnob: Enhance Voice Cloning with Fine-Grained Emotion Control

The popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) have unleashed a new age of Language Agents for solving a diverse range of tasks. While contemporary frontier LLMs are capable enough to power reasonably good Language agents, the closed-API model makes it hard to improve in cases they perform sub-optimally. To address this, recent works have explored techniques to improve their performance using self reflection and prompt optimization techniques. While techniques like self reflection work well in an online setup, contemporary prompt optimization techniques are designed to work on simpler tasks. To address this, we introduce METAREFLECTION, a novel offline reinforcement learning technique that enhances the performance of Language Agents by augmenting a semantic memory based on experiential learnings from past trials. We demonstrate the efficacy of METAREFLECTION by evaluating across multiple domains, including complex logical reasoning, biomedical semantic similarity, open world question answering, and vulnerability threat detection, in Infrastructure-as-Code, with different agent design. METAREFLECTION boosts Language agents’ performance by 4 % to 16.82 % over the raw GPT-4 baseline and performs on par with existing state-of-the-art prompt optimization techniques while requiring fewer LLM calls.

MetaReflection: Learning Instructions for Language Agents using Past Reflections

Recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of pre-trained language models to adversarial attacks. Adversarial defense techniques have been proposed to reconstruct adversarial examples within feature or text spaces. However, these methods struggle to effectively repair the semantics in adversarial examples, resulting in unsatisfactory defense performance. To repair the semantics in adversarial examples, we introduce a novel approach named Reactive Perturbation Defocusing (Rapid), which employs an adversarial detector to identify the fake labels of adversarial examples and leverages adversarial attackers to repair the semantics in adversarial examples. Our extensive experimental results, conducted on four public datasets, demonstrate the consistent effectiveness of Rapid in various adversarial attack scenarios. For easy evaluation, we provide a click-to-run demo of Rapid at https://tinyurl.com/22ercuf8.

The Best Defense is Attack: Repairing Semantics in Textual Adversarial Examples

*Uncertainty expressions* such as 'probably' or 'highly unlikely' are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions, there has been little inquiry into the abilities of language models in the same context. In this paper, we investigate how language models map linguistic expressions of uncertainty to numerical responses. Our approach assesses whether language models can employ theory of mind in this setting: understanding the uncertainty of another agent about a particular statement, independently of the model's own certainty about that statement. We find that 7 out of 10 models are able to map uncertainty expressions to probabilistic responses in a human-like manner. However, we observe systematically different behavior depending on whether a statement is actually true or false. This sensitivity indicates that language models are substantially more susceptible to bias based on their prior knowledge (as compared to humans). These findings raise important questions and have broad implications for human-AI and AI-AI communication.

Perceptions of Linguistic Uncertainty by Language Models and Humans

The rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns about the transparency and fair use of the data used in their pretraining. Detecting such content is challenging due to the scale of the data and limited exposure of each instance during training. We propose ReCaLL (Relative Conditional Log-Likelihood), a novel membership inference attack (MIA) to detect LLMs' pretraining data by leveraging their conditional language modeling capabilities. ReCaLL examines the relative change in conditional log-likelihoods when prefixing target data points with non-member context. Our empirical findings show that conditioning member data on non-member prefixes induces a larger decrease in log-likelihood compared to non-member data. We conduct comprehensive experiments and show that ReCaLL achieves state-of-the-art performance on the WikiMIA dataset, even with random and synthetic prefixes, and can be further improved using an ensemble approach. Moreover, we conduct an in-depth analysis of LLMs' behavior with different membership contexts, providing insights into how LLMs leverage membership information for effective inference at both the sequence and token level.

ReCaLL: Membership Inference via Relative Conditional Log-Likelihoods

Recognizing if LLM output can be grounded in evidence is central to many tasks in NLP: retrieval-augmented generation, summarization, document-grounded dialogue, and more. Current approaches to this kind of fact-checking are based on verifying each piece of a model generation against potential evidence using an LLM. However, this process can be very computationally expensive, requiring many calls to a model to check a single response. In this work, we show how to build small fact-checking models that have GPT-4-level performance but for 400x lower cost. We do this by constructing synthetic training data with GPT-4, which involves creating realistic yet challenging instances of factual errors via a structured generation procedure. Training on this data teaches models to check each fact in the claim and recognize synthesis of information across sentences. For evaluation, we unify datasets from recent work on fact-checking and grounding LLM generations into a new benchmark, LLM-AggreFact. Our best system MiniCheck-FT5 (770M parameters) outperforms all systems of comparable size and reaches GPT-4 accuracy. We release LLM-AggreFact, code for data synthesis, and models.

MiniCheck: Efficient Fact-Checking of LLMs on Grounding Documents

Language agents, built on top of language models (LMs), are systems that can interact with complex environments, such as the open web. In this work, we examine whether such agents can perform realistic and time-consuming tasks on the web, e.g., monitoring real-estate markets or locating relevant nearby businesses. We introduce AssistantBench, a challenging new benchmark consisting of 214 realistic tasks that can be automatically evaluated, covering different scenarios and domains. We find that AssistantBench exposes the limitations of current systems, including language models and retrieval-augmented language models, as no model reaches an accuracy of more than 25 points. While closed-book LMs perform well in terms of accuracy, they exhibit low precision and tend to hallucinate facts. State-of-the-art web agents reach a score of near zero. Additionally, we introduce SeePlanAct (SPA), a new web agent that significantly outperforms previous agents, and an ensemble of SPA and closed-book models reaches the best overall performance. Moreover, we analyze failures of current systems and highlight that open web navigation remains a major challenge.

AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks?

While there has been significant development of models for Plain Language Summarization (PLS), evaluation remains a challenge. PLS lacks a dedicated assessment metric, and the suitability of text generation evaluation metrics is unclear due to the unique transformations involved (e.g., adding background explanations, removing jargon). To address these questions, our study introduces a granular meta-evaluation testbed, APPLS, designed to evaluate metrics for PLS. We identify four PLS criteria from previous work---informativeness, simplification, coherence, and faithfulness---and define a set of perturbations corresponding to these criteria that sensitive metrics should be able to detect. We apply these perturbations to extractive hypotheses for two PLS datasets to form our testbed. Using APPLS, we assess performance of 14 metrics, including automated scores, lexical features, and LLM prompt-based evaluations. Our analysis reveals that while some current metrics show sensitivity to specific criteria, no single method captures all four criteria simultaneously. We therefore recommend a suite of automated metrics be used to capture PLS quality along all relevant criteria. This work contributes the first meta-evaluation testbed for PLS and a comprehensive evaluation of existing metrics.

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Muting Whisper: A Universal Acoustic Adversarial Attack on Speech Foundation Models

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