United States

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate the same sequences contained in the pre-train corpora, known as memorization.
Previous research studied it at a macro level, leaving micro yet important questions under-explored, e.g., what makes sentences memorized, the dynamics when generating memorized sequence, its connection to unmemorized sequence, and its predictability.
We answer the above questions by analyzing the relationship of memorization with outputs from LLM, namely, embeddings, probability distributions, and generated tokens.
A memorization score is calculated as the overlap between generated tokens and actual continuations when the LLM is prompted with a context sequence from the pre-train corpora.
Our findings reveal:
(1) The inter-correlation between memorized/unmemorized sentences, model size, continuation size, and context size, as well as the transition dynamics between sentences of different memorization scores,
(2) A sudden drop and increase in the frequency of input tokens when generating memorized/unmemorized sequences (boundary effect),
(3) Cluster of sentences with different memorization scores in the embedding space,
(4) An inverse boundary effect in the entropy of probability distributions for generated memorized/unmemorized sequences,
(5) The predictability of memorization is related to model size and continuation length. 
In addition, we show a Transformer model trained by the hidden states of LLM can predict unmemorized tokens.

EMNLP 2024

A Multi-Perspective Analysis of Memorization in Large Language Models

evaluation and metrics

conversational modeling

multi-party conversation

### 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.

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EACL 2023

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.

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.
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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.

Models need appropriate inductive biases to effectively learn from small amounts of data and generalize systematically outside of the training distribution. While Transformers are highly versatile and powerful, they can still benefit from enhanced structural inductive biases for seq2seq tasks, especially those involving syntactic transformations, such as converting active to passive voice or semantic parsing. In this paper, we propose to strengthen the structural inductive bias of a Transformer by intermediate pre-training to perform synthetically generated syntactic transformations of dependency trees given a description of the transformation. Our experiments confirm that this helps with few-shot learning of syntactic tasks such as chunking, and also improves structural generalization for semantic parsing. Our analysis shows that the intermediate pre-training leads to attention heads that keep track of which syntactic transformation needs to be applied to which token, and that the model can leverage these attention heads on downstream tasks.

Strengthening Structural Inductive Biases by Pre-training to Perform Syntactic Transformations

Most language models currently available are prone to self-contradiction during dialogues. To mitigate this issue, this study explores a novel contradictory dialogue processing task that aims to detect and modify contradictory statements in a conversation. This task is inspired by research on context faithfulness and dialogue comprehension, which have demonstrated that the detection and understanding of contradictions often necessitate detailed explanations. We develop a dataset comprising contradictory dialogues, in which one side of the conversation contradicts itself. Each dialogue is accompanied by an explanatory label that highlights the location and details of the contradiction. With this dataset, we present a Red Teaming framework for contradictory dialogue processing. The framework detects and attempts to explain the dialogue, then modifies the existing contradictory content using the explanation. Our experiments demonstrate that the framework improves the ability to detect contradictory dialogues and provides valid explanations. Additionally, it showcases distinct capabilities for modifying such dialogues. Our study highlights the importance of the logical inconsistency problem in conversational AI.

Red Teaming Language Models for Processing Contradictory Dialogues

The limited generalization of coreference resolution (CR) models has been a major bottleneck in the task’s broad application. Prior work has identified annotation differences, especially for mention detection, as one of the main reasons for the generalization gap and proposed using additional annotated target domain data. Rather than relying on this additional annotation, we propose an alternative referential task, Major Entity Identification (MEI), where we: (a) assume the target entities to be specified in the input, and (b) limit the task to only the frequent entities. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MEI models generalize well across domains on multiple datasets with supervised models and LLM-based few-shot prompting. Additionally, MEI fits the classification framework, which enables the use of robust and intuitive classification-based metrics. Finally, MEI is also of practical use as it allows a user to search for all mentions of a particular entity or a group of entities of interest.

Major Entity Identification: A Generalizable Alternative to Coreference Resolution

Guardrails have emerged as an alternative to safety alignment for content moderation of large language models (LLMs). Existing model-based guardrails have not been designed for resource-constrained computational portable devices, such as mobile phones, more and more of which are running LLM-based applications locally. We introduce LoRA-Guard, a parameter-efficient guardrail adaptation method that relies on knowledge sharing between LLMs and guardrail models. LoRA-Guard extracts language features from the LLMs and adapts them for the content moderation task using low-rank adapters, while a dual-path design prevents any performance degradation on the generative task. We show that LoRA-Guard outperforms existing approaches with 100-1000x lower parameter overhead while maintaining accuracy, enabling on-device content moderation.

LoRA-Guard: Parameter-Efficient Guardrail Adaptation for Content Moderation of Large Language Models

Various linearizations have been proposed to cast syntactic dependency parsing as sequence labeling. However, these approaches do not support more complex graph-based representations, such as semantic dependencies or enhanced universal dependencies, as they cannot handle reentrancy or cycles. By extending them, we define a range of unbounded and bounded linearizations that can be used to cast graph parsing as a tagging task, enlarging the toolbox of problems that can be solved under this paradigm. Experimental results on semantic dependency and enhanced UD parsing show that with a good choice of encoding, sequence-labeling semantic dependency parsers combine high efficiency with accuracies close to the state of the art, in spite of their simplicity.

Dependency Graph Parsing as Sequence Labeling

A key concern with the concept of *"alignment"* is the implicit question of *"alignment to what?"*. AI systems are increasingly used across the world, yet safety alignment is often focused on homogeneous monolingual settings. Additionally, preference training and safety measures often overfit to harms common in Western-centric datasets. Here, we explore the viability of different alignment approaches when balancing dual objectives: addressing and optimizing for a non-homogeneous set of languages and cultural preferences while minimizing both global and local harms. We collect the first human annotated red teaming prompts in different languages, distinguishing between global and local harm, which serve as a laboratory to understand the reliability of alignment techniques when faced with preference distributions that are non-stationary across geographies and languages. While this setting is seldom covered by the literature to date, which primarily centers on English harm mitigation, it captures real-world interactions with AI systems around the world. We establish a new precedent for state-of-the-art alignment techniques across 6 languages with minimal degradation in general performance. Our work provides important insights into cross-lingual transfer and novel optimization approaches to safeguard AI systems designed to serve global populations.

The Multilingual Alignment Prism: Aligning Global and Local Preferences to Reduce Harm

The role of subword segmentation in relation to capturing morphological patterns in LLMs is currently not well explored. Ideally, one would train models like GPT using various segmentations and evaluate how well word meanings are captured. Since this is not computationally feasible, we group words according to their segmentation properties and compare how well a model can solve a linguistic task for these groups. We study two criteria: (i) adherence to morpheme boundaries and (ii) the segmentation consistency of the different inflected forms of a lemma. We select word forms with high and low values for these criteria and carry out experiments on GPT-4o’s ability to capture verbal inflection for 10 languages. Our results indicate that in particular the criterion of segmentation consistency can help to predict the model’s ability to recognize and generate the lemma from an inflected form, providing evidence that subword segmentation is relevant.

Subword Segmentation in LLMs: Looking at Inflection and Consistency

This paper introduces and investigates the problem of Task and Language Incremental Continual Learning (TLCL), wherein a multilingual model is systematically updated to accommodate new tasks in previously learned languages or new languages for established tasks. This significant yet previously unexplored area holds substantial practical relevance as it mirrors the dynamic requirements of real-world applications. We benchmark a representative set of continual learning (CL) algorithms for TLCL. Furthermore, we propose Task and Language-Specific Adapters (TLSA), an adapter-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy. TLSA facilitates cross-lingual and cross-task transfer and outperforms other parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques. Crucially, TLSA reduces parameter growth stemming from saving adapters to linear complexity from polynomial complexity as it was with parameter isolation-based adapter tuning. We conducted experiments on several NLP tasks arising across several languages. We observed that TLSA outperforms all other parameter-efficient approaches without requiring access to historical data for replay.

TL-CL: Task And Language Incremental Continual Learning

In-context learning methods are popular inference strategies where Large Language Models (LLMs) are elicited to solve a task using provided demonstrations without parameter updates. Among these approaches are the reasoning methods, best exemplified by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Program-Aided Language Models (PAL), which elicit LLMs to generate reasoning paths, thus promoting accuracy and attracting increasing attention. However, despite the success of these methods, the ability to deliver multi-step reasoning remains limited to a single language, making it challenging to generalize to other languages and hindering global development.

In this work, we propose Cross-lingual Program-Aided Language Models (CrossPAL), a method for aligning reasoning programs across languages. In particular, our method delivers programs as intermediate reasoning steps in different languages through a double-step cross-lingual prompting mechanism inspired by the Program-Aided approach. In addition, we introduce Self-consistent CrossPAL (SCrossPAL) to ensemble different reasoning paths across languages. Our experimental evaluations show that our method significantly outperforms existing prompting methods, reducing the number of interactions and achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Empowering Multi-step Reasoning across Languages via Program-Aided Language Models

Language documentation projects often involve the creation of annotated text in a format such as interlinear glossed text (IGT), which captures fine-grained morphosyntactic analyses in a morpheme-by-morpheme format. However, there are few existing resources providing large amounts of standardized, easily accessible IGT data, limiting their applicability to linguistic research, and making it difficult to use such data in NLP modeling. 

We compile the largest existing corpus of IGT data from a variety of sources, covering over 450k examples across 1.8k languages, to enable research on crosslingual transfer and IGT generation. We normalize much of our data to follow a standard set of labels across languages.

Furthermore, we explore the task of automatically generating IGT in order to aid documentation projects. As many languages lack sufficient monolingual data, we pretrain a large multilingual model on our corpus. We demonstrate the utility of this model by finetuning it on monolingual corpora, outperforming SOTA models by up to 6.6\%. Our pretrained model and dataset are available on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/collections/lecslab/glosslm-66da150854209e910113dd87

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Next from EMNLP 2024

Strengthening Structural Inductive Biases by Pre-training to Perform Syntactic Transformations

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