United States

In Multimodal Language Models (MLMs), the cost of manually annotating high-quality image-text pair data for fine-tuning and alignment is extremely high. While existing multimodal data augmentation frameworks propose ways to augment image-text pairs, they either suffer from semantic inconsistency between texts and images, or generate unrealistic images, causing knowledge gap with real world examples. To address these issues, we propose Attribute-based Multimodal Data Augmentation (ARMADA), a novel multimodal data augmentation method via knowledge-guided manipulation of visual attributes of the mentioned entities. Specifically, we extract entities and their visual attributes from the original text data, then search for alternative values for the visual attributes under the guidance of knowledge bases (KBs) and large language models (LLMs). We then utilize an image-editing model to edit the images with the extracted attributes. ARMADA is a novel multimodal data generation framework that: (i) extracts knowledge-grounded attributes from symbolic KBs for semantically consistent yet distinctive image-text pair generation, (ii) generates visually similar images of disparate categories using neighboring entities in the KB hierarchy, and (iii) uses the commonsense knowledge of LLMs to modulate auxiliary visual attributes such as backgrounds for more robust representation of original entities. Our empirical results over four downstream tasks demonstrate the efficacy of our framework to produce high-quality data and enhance the model performance. This also highlights the need to leverage external knowledge proxies for enhanced interpretability and real-world grounding.

EMNLP 2024

ARMADA: Attribute-Based Multimodal Data Augmentation

multimodal data augmentation

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

## 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)

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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.

Generative retrieval (Wang et al., 2022; Tay et al., 2022) is a popular approach for end-to-end document retrieval that directly generates document identifiers given an input query. We introduce summarization-based document IDs, in which each document's ID is composed of an extractive summary or abstractive keyphrases generated by a language model, rather than an integer ID sequence or bags of n-grams as proposed in past work. We find that abstractive, content-based IDs (ACID) and an ID based on the first 30 tokens are very effective in direct comparisons with previous approaches to ID creation. We show that using ACID improves top-10 and top-20 recall by 15.6% and 14.4% (relative) respectively versus the cluster-based integer ID baseline on the MSMARCO 100k retrieval task, and 9.8% and 9.9% respectively on the Wikipedia-based NQ 100k retrieval task. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of human-readable, natural-language IDs created through summarization for generative retrieval. We also observed that extractive IDs outperformed abstractive IDs on Wikipedia articles in NQ but not the snippets in MSMARCO, which suggests that document characteristics affect generative retrieval performance.

Summarization-Based Document IDs for Generative Retrieval with Language Models

The rise of AI-generated content in popular information sources raises significant concerns about accountability, accuracy, and bias amplification. Beyond directly impacting consumers, the widespread presence of this content poses questions for the long-term viability of training language models on vast internet sweeps. We use GPTZero, a proprietary AI detector, and Binoculars, an open-source alternative, to establish lower bounds on the presence of AI-generated content in recently created Wikipedia pages. Both detectors reveal a marked increase in AI-generated content in recent pages compared to those from before the release of GPT-3.5. With thresholds calibrated to achieve a 1% false positive rate on pre-GPT-3.5 articles, detectors flag over 5% of newly created English Wikipedia articles as AI-generated, with lower percentages for German, French, and Italian articles. Flagged Wikipedia articles are typically of lower quality and are often self-promotional or partial towards a specific viewpoint on controversial topics.

The Rise of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia

Online Knowledge Repositories (OKRs) like Wikipedia offer communities a way to share and preserve information about themselves and their ways of living. However, for communities with low-resourced languages—including most African communities—the quality and volume of content available are often inadequate. One reason for this lack of adequate content could be that many OKRs embody Western ways of knowledge preservation and sharing, requiring many low-resourced language communities to adapt to new interactions. To understand the challenges faced by low-resourced language contributors on the popular OKR Wikipedia, we conducted (1) a thematic analysis of Wikipedia forum discussions and (2) a contextual inquiry study with 14 novice contributors. We focused on three Ethiopian languages: Afan Oromo, Amharic, and Tigrinya. Our analysis revealed several recurring themes; for example, contributors struggle to find resources to corroborate their articles in low-resourced languages, and language technology support, like translation systems and spellcheck, result in several errors that waste contributors’ time. We hope our study will support designers in making online knowledge repositories accessible to low-resourced language speakers.

[PUBLISHED] Low-Resourced Languages and Online Knwoledge Repositories: A Need-Finding Study

Wikipedia articles (content pages) are commonly used corpora in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, especially in low-resource languages other than English. Yet, a few research studies have studied the three Arabic Wikipedia editions, Arabic Wikipedia (AR), Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia (ARZ), and Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia (ARY), and documented issues in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia edition regarding the massive automatic creation of its articles using template-based translation from English to Arabic without human involvement, overwhelming the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia with articles that do not only have low-quality content but also with articles that do not represent the Egyptian people, their culture, and their dialect. In this paper, we aim to mitigate the problem of template translation that occurred in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia by identifying these template-translated articles and their characteristics through exploratory analysis and building automatic detection systems. We first explore the content of the three Arabic Wikipedia editions in terms of density, quality, and human contributions and utilize the resulting insights to build multivariate machine learning classifiers leveraging articles’ metadata to detect the template-translated articles automatically. We then publicly deploy and host the best-performing classifier as an online application called ‘Egyptian Wikipedia Scanner’ and release the extracted, filtered, labeled, and preprocessed datasets to the research community to benefit from our datasets and the online, web-based detection system.

[PUBLISHED] Leveraging Corpus Metadata to Detect Template-based Translation: An Exploratory Case Study of the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia Edition

We present a prototype for the generation of Wikipedia articles from Wikidata in multiple languages. For the generation we leverage the multilingual resources in the GF Resource Grammars Library (RGL), the GF WordNet and the existing labels in Wikidata. The result is a system where we get an out-of-the-box baseline generation for currently 26 languages which can be quickly adjusted by hand to produce publishing quality documents. We evaluate six of the languages.

[PUBLISHED] Leveraging Grammatical Framework and WordNet for Natural Language Generation from Wikidata

The similarity between the question and indexed documents is a crucial factor in document retrieval for retrieval-augmented question answering. Although this is typically the only method for obtaining the relevant documents, it is not the sole approach when dealing with entity-centric questions. In this study, we propose \textit{Entity Retrieval}, a novel retrieval method which rather than relying on question-document similarity, depends on the salient entities within the question to identify the retrieval documents. We conduct an in-depth analysis of the performance of both dense and sparse retrieval methods in comparison to \textit{Entity Retrieval}. Our findings reveal that our method not only leads to more accurate answers to entity-centric questions but also operates more efficiently.

[PUBLISHED] Entity Retrieval for Answering Entity-Centric Questions

An edit summary is a succinct comment written by a Wikipedia editor explaining the nature of, and reasons for, an edit to a Wikipedia page. Edit summaries are crucial for maintaining the encyclopedia: they are the first thing seen by content moderators and they help them decide whether to accept or reject an edit. Additionally, edit summaries constitute a valuable data source for researchers. Unfortunately, as we show, for many edits, summaries are either missing or incomplete. To overcome this problem and help editors write useful edit summaries, we propose a model for recommending edit summaries generated by a language model trained to produce good edit summaries given the representation of an edit diff. To overcome the challenges of mixed-quality training data and efficiency requirements imposed by the scale of Wikipedia, we fine-tune a small generative language model on a curated mix of human and synthetic data. Our model performs on par with human editors. Commercial large language models are able to solve this task better than human editors, but are not well suited for Wikipedia, while open-source ones fail on this task. More broadly, we showcase how language modeling technology can be used to support humans in maintaining one of the largest and most visible projects on the Web.

[PUBLISHED] Edisum: Summarizing and Explaining Wikipedia Edits at Scale

While language model (LM)-powered chatbots and generative search engines excel at answering concrete queries, discovering information in the terrain of unknown unknowns remains challenging for users. To emulate the common educational scenario where children/students learn by listening to and participating in conversations of their parents/teachers, we create Collaborative STORM (Co-STORM). Unlike QA systems that require users to ask all the questions, Co-STORM lets users observe and occasionally steer the discourse among several LM agents. The agents ask questions on the user's behalf, allowing the user to discover unknown unknowns serendipitously. To facilitate user interaction, Co-STORM assists users in tracking the discourse by organizing the uncovered information into a dynamic mind map, ultimately generating a comprehensive report as takeaways. For automatic evaluation, we construct the WildSeek dataset by collecting real information-seeking records with user goals. Co-STORM outperforms baseline methods on both discourse trace and report quality. In a further human evaluation, 70% of participants prefer Co-STORM over a search engine, and 78% favor it over a RAG chatbot.

[PUBLISHED] Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models

Opening Session

As capabilities of foundation models skyrocket, openness plummets. In this talk, I argue that open-source models are essential for the long-term goal of building a rigorous foundation for AI. Greater access—from API to open-weight to open-source—enables deeper forms of research. API access allows us to push the frontier of agents, and I will present our recent work on simulation and problem-solving agents. Open weights enables reproducible research on safety, interpretability, and more generally, “model forensics”. Open-source unlocks fundamental innovations in architectures, training procedures, and data curation methods. Of course, the key obstacle for building open-source models is the resources required (data, compute, and research/engineering). I will conclude with some promising directions that leverage the community that bring us closer to the vision of open-source foundation models.

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Summarization-Based Document IDs for Generative Retrieval with Language Models

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