United States

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) poses a significant challenge in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). While mainstream MRC methods predominantly leverage extractive strategies using encoder-only models such as BERT, generative approaches face the issue of $\textit{out-of-control generation}$ -- a critical problem where answers generated are often incorrect, irrelevant, or unfaithful to the source text. To address these limitations in generative models for extractive MRC, we introduce the $\textbf{Q}$uestion-$\textbf{A}$ttended $\textbf{S}$pan $\textbf{E}$xtraction ($\textit{QASE}$) module. Integrated during the fine-tuning phase of pre-trained generative language models (PLMs), $\textit{QASE}$ significantly enhances their performance, allowing them to surpass the extractive capabilities of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 in few-shot settings. Notably, these gains in performance do not come with an increase in computational demands. The efficacy of the $\textit{QASE}$ module has been rigorously tested across various datasets, consistently achieving or even surpassing state-of-the-art (SOTA) results, thereby bridging the gap between generative and extractive models in extractive MRC tasks. Our code is available at this GitHub repository: https://github.com/lynneeai/QASE.git.

EMNLP 2024

Enhancing Pre-Trained Generative Language Models with Question Attended Span Extraction on Machine Reading Comprehension

instruction tuning

large language model

generalization

**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.

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.

Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) aims to identify and correct spelling errors in Chinese texts, where enhanced semantic understanding of a sentence can significantly improve correction accuracy. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional mastery of world knowledge and semantic understanding, rendering them more robust against spelling errors. However, the application of LLMs in CSC is a double-edged sword, as they tend to unnecessarily alter sentence length and modify rare but correctly used phrases. In this paper, by leveraging the capabilities of LLMs while mitigating their limitations, we propose a novel plug-and-play Alignment-and-Replacement Module ARM that enhances the performance of existing CSC models and without the need for retraining or fine-tuning. Experiment results and analysis on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed module.

ARM: An Alignment-and-Replacement Module for Chinese Spelling Check Based on LLMs

Embeddings from Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as critical components in various applications, particularly for information retrieval. While high-dimensional embeddings generally demonstrate superior performance as they contain more salient information, their practical application is frequently hindered by elevated computational latency and the associated higher cost. To address these challenges, we propose Matryoshka-Adaptor, a novel tuning framework designed for the customization of LLM embeddings. Matryoshka-Adaptor facilitates substantial dimensionality reduction while maintaining comparable performance levels, thereby achieving a significant enhancement in computational efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Our framework directly modifies the embeddings from pre-trained LLMs which is designed to be seamlessly integrated with any LLM architecture, encompassing those accessible exclusively through black-box APIs. Also, it exhibits efficacy in both unsupervised and supervised learning settings. A rigorous evaluation conducted across a diverse corpus of English, multilingual, and multimodal datasets consistently reveals substantial gains with Matryoshka-Adaptor. Notably, with Google and OpenAI Embedding APIs, Matryoshka-Adaptor achieves a reduction in dimensionality ranging from two- to twelve-fold without compromising performance across multiple BEIR datasets.

Matryoshka-Adaptor: Unsupervised and Supervised Tuning for Smaller Embedding Dimensions

Recent studies show the growing significance of document retrieval in the generation of LLMs, i.e., RAG, within the scientific domain by bridging their knowledge gap. However, dense retrievers often struggle with domain-specific retrieval and complex query-document relationships, particularly when query segments correspond to various parts of a document. To alleviate such prevalent challenges, this paper introduces $\texttt{MixGR}$, which improves dense retrievers' awareness of query-document matching across various levels of granularity in queries and documents using a zero-shot approach. $\texttt{MixGR}$ fuses various metrics based on these granularities to a united score that reflects a comprehensive query-document similarity. Our experiments demonstrate that $\texttt{MixGR}$ outperforms previous document retrieval by 24.7%, 9.8%, and 6.9% on nDCG@5 with unsupervised, supervised, and LLM-based retrievers, respectively, averaged on queries containing multiple subqueries from five scientific retrieval datasets. Moreover, the efficacy of two downstream scientific question-answering tasks highlights the advantage of $\texttt{MixGR}$ to boost the application of LLMs in the scientific domain.

MixGR: Enhancing Retriever Generalization for Scientific Domain through Complementary Granularity

The increasing availability of multimodal data from electronic health records (EHR) has paved the way for deep learning methods to improve diagnosis accuracy. However, deep learning models are data-driven, requiring large-scale datasets to achieve high generalizability. Inspired by how human experts leverage reasoning for medical diagnosis, we propose CARER, a novel health risk prediction framework, that enhances deep learning models with clinical rationales derived from medically proficient Large Language Models (LLMs). In addition, we provide a cross-view alignment loss which aligns the "local" view from the patient's health status with the "global" view from the external LLM's clinical reasoning to boost the mutual feature learning. Through extensive experiments on two predictive tasks using two popular EHR datasets, our CARER's significantly exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art models by up to 11.2%, especially in improving data efficiency and generalizability. Our code is available at https://github.com/tuandung2812/CARER-EMNLP-2024

CARER - ClinicAl Reasoning-Enhanced Representation for Temporal Health Risk Prediction

The ever-growing biomedical publications magnify the challenge of extracting structured data from unstructured texts. This task involves two components: biomedical entity identification (Named Entity Recognition, NER) and their interrelation determination (Relation Extraction, RE). However, existing methods often neglect unique features of the biomedical literature, such as ambiguous entities, nested proper nouns, and overlapping relation triplets, and underutilize prior knowledge, leading to an intolerable performance decline in the biomedical domain, especially with limited annotated training data. In this paper, we propose the Biomedical Relation-First eXtraction (Bio-RFX) model by leveraging sentence-level relation classification before entity extraction to tackle entity ambiguity. Moreover, we exploit structural constraints between entities and relations to guide the model's hypothesis space, enhancing extraction performance across different training scenarios. Comprehensive experimental results on biomedical datasets show that Bio-RFX achieves significant improvements on both NER and RE tasks. Even under the low-resource training scenarios, it outperforms all baselines in NER and has highly competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art fine-tuned baselines in RE.

Bio-RFX: Refining Biomedical Extraction via Advanced Relation Classification and Structural Constraints

Large language models (LLMs) are proven to benefit a lot from retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in alleviating hallucinations confronted with knowledge-intensive questions. RAG adopts information retrieval techniques to inject external knowledge from semantic-relevant documents as input contexts. However, due to today's Internet being flooded with numerous noisy and fabricating content, it is inevitable that RAG systems are vulnerable to these noises and prone to respond incorrectly. To this end, we propose to optimize the retrieval-augmented Generator with a Adversarial Tuning Multi-agent system **(ATM)**. The ATM steers the Generator to have a robust perspective of useful documents for question answering with the help of an auxiliary Attacker agent. The Generator and the Attacker are tuned adversarially for several iterations. After rounds of multi-agent iterative tuning, the Generator can eventually better discriminate useful documents amongst fabrications. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of ATM and we also observe that the Generator can achieve better performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

ATM: Adversarial Tuning Multi-agent System Makes a Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generator

Progress in Text-to-Image (T2I) models has significantly advanced the generation of images from textual descriptions. Existing metrics, such as CLIP, effectively measure the semantic alignment between single prompts and their corresponding images. However, they fall short in evaluating a model's ability to generalize across a broad spectrum of textual inputs. To address this gap, we propose the VLEU (\underline{\textbf{V}}isual \underline{\textbf{L}}anguage \underline{\textbf{E}}valuation \underline{\textbf{U}}nderstudy) metric. VLEU leverages the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) to sample from the visual text domain, encompassing the entire range of potential inputs for the T2I task, to generate a wide variety of visual text. The images generated by T2I models from these prompts are then assessed for their alignment with the input text using the CLIP model. VLEU quantitatively measures a model's generalizability by computing the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the visual text marginal distribution and the conditional distribution over the images generated by the model. This provides a comprehensive metric for comparing the overall generalizability of T2I models, beyond single-prompt evaluations, and offers valuable insights during the finetuning process. Our experimental results demonstrate VLEU's effectiveness in evaluating the generalizability of various T2I models, positioning it as an essential metric for future research and development in image synthesis from text prompts. Our code and data will be publicly available at \url{https://github.com/mio7690/VLEU}.

VLEU: a Method for Automatic Evaluation for Generalizability of Text-to-Image Models

Large language and vision models (LLVMs) have been driven by the generalization power of large language models (LLMs) and the advent of visual instruction tuning. Along with scaling them up directly, these models enable LLVMs to showcase powerful vision language (VL) performances by covering diverse tasks via natural language instructions. However, existing open-source LLVMs that perform comparably to closed-source LLVMs such as GPT-4V are often considered too large (e.g., 26B, 34B, and 110B parameters), having a larger number of layers. These large models demand costly, high-end resources for both training and inference. To address this issue, we present a new efficient LLVM family with 1.8B, 3.8B, and 7B LLM model sizes, Traversal of Layers (TroL), which enables the reuse of layers in a token-wise manner. This layer traversing technique simulates the effect of looking back and retracing the answering stream while increasing the number of forward propagation layers without physically adding more layers. We demonstrate that TroL employs a simple layer traversing approach yet efficiently outperforms the open-source LLVMs with larger model sizes and rivals the performances of the closed-source LLVMs with substantial sizes.

TroL: Traversal of Layers for Large Language and Vision Models

Retrieval module can be plugged into many downstream NLP tasks to improve their performance, such as open-domain question answering and retrieval-augmented generation. The key to a retrieval system is to calculate relevance scores to query and passage pairs. However, the definition of relevance is often ambiguous. We observed that a major class of relevance aligns with the concept of entailment in NLI tasks. Based on this observation, we designed a method called entailment tuning to improve the embedding of dense retrievers. Specifically, we unify the form of retrieval data and NLI data using existence claim as a bridge. Then, we train retrievers to predict the claims entailed in a passage with a variant task of masked prediction. Our method can be efficiently plugged into current dense retrieval methods, and experiments show the effectiveness of our method.

Improve Dense Passage Retrieval with Entailment Tuning

Exploring the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in puzzle solving unveils critical insights into their potential and challenges in AI, marking a significant step towards understanding their applicability in complex reasoning tasks. This survey leverages a unique taxonomy—dividing puzzles into rule-based and rule-less categories—to critically assess LLMs through various methodologies, including prompting techniques, neuro-symbolic approaches, and fine-tuning. Through a critical review of relevant datasets and benchmarks, we assess LLMs' performance, identifying significant challenges in complex puzzle scenarios. Our findings highlight the disparity between LLM capabilities and human-like reasoning, particularly in those requiring advanced logical inference. The survey underscores the necessity for novel strategies and richer datasets to advance LLMs' puzzle-solving proficiency and contribute to AI's logical reasoning and creative problem-solving advancements.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

ARM: An Alignment-and-Replacement Module for Chinese Spelling Check Based on LLMs

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