United States

Recent studies have addressed intricate phonological phenomena in French, relying on either extensive linguistic knowledge or a significant amount of sentence-level pronunciation data. However, creating such resources is expensive and non-trivial. To this end, we propose a novel two-step approach that encompasses two pronunciation tasks: grapheme-to-phoneme and post-lexical processing. We then investigate the efficacy of the proposed approach with a notably limited amount of sentence-level pronunciation data. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed two-step approach effectively mitigates the lack of extensive labeled data, and serves as a feasible solution for addressing French phonological phenomena even under resource-constrained environments.

EMNLP 2024

A Two-Step Approach for Data-Efficient French Pronunciation Learning

word embedding interpretability

cross-linguistic semantics

independent component analysis

multilingual nlp

## 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.

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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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.

Prior works on detoxification are scattered in the sense that they do not cover all aspects of detoxification needed in a real-world scenario. Notably, prior works restrict the task of developing detoxification models to only a seen subset of platforms, leaving the question of how the models would perform on unseen platforms unexplored. Additionally, these works do not address non-detoxifiability, a phenomenon whereby the toxic text cannot be detoxified without altering the meaning. We propose DetoxLLM, the first comprehensive end-to-end detoxification framework, which attempts to alleviate the aforementioned limitations. We first introduce a cross-platform pseudo-parallel corpus applying multi-step data processing and generation strategies leveraging ChatGPT. We then train a suite of detoxification models with our cross-platform corpus. We show that our detoxification models outperform the SoTA model trained with human-annotated parallel corpus. We further introduce explanation to promote transparency and trustworthiness. DetoxLLM additionally offers a unique paraphrase detector especially dedicated for the detoxification task to tackle the non-detoxifiable cases. Through experimental analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our cross-platform corpus and the robustness of DetoxLLM against adversarial toxicity.

DetoxLLM: A Framework for Detoxification with Explanations

Automatic metrics are used as proxies to evaluate abstractive summarization systems when human annotations are too expensive. To be useful, these metrics should be fine-grained, show a high correlation with human annotations, and ideally be independant of reference quality; however, most standard evaluation metrics for summarization are reference-based, and existing reference-free metrics correlates poorly with relevance, especially on summaries of longer documents. In this paper, we introduce a reference-free metric that correlates well with human evaluated relevance, while being very cheap to compute. We show that this metric can also be used along reference-based metrics to improve their robustness in low quality reference settings.

Mitigating the Impact of Reference Quality on Evaluation of Summarization Systems with Reference-Free Metrics

Natural Language Generation (NLG), and more generally generative AI, are among the currently most impactful research fields. Creative NLG, such as automatic poetry generation, is a fascinating niche in this area. While most previous research has focused on forms of the Turing test when evaluating automatic poetry generation — can humans distinguish between automatic and human generated poetry — we evaluate the diversity of automatically generated poetry (with a focus on quatrains), by comparing distributions of generated poetry to distributions of human poetry along structural, lexical, semantic and stylistic dimensions, assessing different model types (word vs. character-level, general purpose LLMs vs. poetry-specific models), including the very recent LLaMA3-8B, and types of fine-tuning (conditioned vs. unconditioned). We find that current automatic poetry systems are considerably underdiverse along multiple dimensions — they often do not rhyme sufficiently, are semantically too uniform and even do not match the length distribution of human poetry. Our experiments reveal, however, that style-conditioning and character-level modeling clearly increases diversity across virtually all dimensions we explore. Our identified limitations may serve as the basis for more genuinely diverse future poetry generation models.

Evaluating Diversity in Automatic Poetry Generation

Extractive summarization plays a pivotal role in natural language processing due to its wide-range applications in summarizing diverse content efficiently, while also being faithful to the original content. Despite significant advancement achieved in extractive summarization by Large Language Models (LLMs), these summaries frequently exhibit incoherence. An important aspect of the coherent summary is its readability for intended users. Although there have been many datasets and benchmarks proposed for creating coherent extractive summaries, none of them currently incorporate user intent to improve coherence in extractive summarization. Motivated by this, we propose a systematically created human-annotated dataset consisting of coherent summaries for five publicly available datasets and natural language user feedback, offering valuable insights into how to improve coherence in extractive summaries. We utilize this dataset for aligning LLMs through supervised fine-tuning with natural language human feedback to enhance the coherence of their generated summaries. Preliminary experiments with Falcon-40B and Llama-2-13B show significant performance improvements (~10% Rouge-L) in terms of producing coherent summaries. We further utilize human feedback to benchmark results over instruction-tuned models such as FLAN-T5 which resulted in several interesting findings.

Towards Enhancing Coherence in Extractive Summarization: Dataset and Experiments with LLMs

Personality recognition aims to identify the personality traits implied in user data such as dialogues and social media posts. Current research predominantly treats personality recognition as a classification task, failing to reveal the supporting evidence for the recognized personality. In this paper, we propose a novel task named Explainable Personality Recognition, aiming to reveal the reasoning process as supporting evidence of the personality trait. Inspired by personality theories, personality traits are made up of stable patterns of personality state, where the states are short-term characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a concrete situation at a specific moment in time. We propose an explainable personality recognition framework called Chain-of-Personality-Evidence (CoPE), which involves a reasoning process from specific contexts to short-term personality states to long-term personality traits. Furthermore, based on the CoPE framework, we construct an explainable personality recognition dataset from dialogues, PersonalityEvd. We introduce two explainable personality state recognition and explainable personality trait recognition tasks, which require models to recognize the personality state and trait labels and their corresponding support evidence. Our extensive experiments based on Large Language Models on the two tasks show that revealing personality traits is very challenging and we present some insights for future research. We will release our dataset and source code to facilitate further studies in this direction.

Revealing Personality Traits: A New Benchmark Dataset for Explainable Personality Recognition on Dialogues

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in code generation. However, how to reliably evaluate code generated by LLMs remains an unresolved problem. This paper presents CodeJudge, a code evaluation framework that leverages LLMs to evaluate the semantic correctness of generated code without the need for test cases. We investigate different ways to guide the LLM in performing “slow thinking” to arrive at an in-depth and reliable evaluation. We experimented with four LLMs as evaluators on four code generation datasets and five programming languages. The results show that CodeJudge significantly outperformed existing methods in most settings. Furthermore, compared with a SOTA GPT-3.5-based code evaluation method, CodeJudge achieved better results even when using a much smaller model, Llama-3-8B-Instruct. Our code and datasets are available on GitHub https://github.com/VichyTong/CodeJudge.

CodeJudge: Evaluating Code Generation with Large Language Models

Although CLIPScore is a powerful generic metric that captures the similarity between a text and an image, it fails to distinguish between a caption that is meant to complement the information in an image and a description that is meant to replace an image entirely, e.g., for accessibility. We address this shortcoming by updating the CLIP model with the Concadia dataset to assign higher scores to descriptions than captions using parameter efficient fine-tuning and a loss objective derived from work on causal interpretability. This model correlates with the judgements of blind and low-vision people while preserving transfer capabilities and has interpretable structure that sheds light on the caption--description distinction.

Updating CLIP to Prefer Descriptions Over Captions

Recent advances have led to the availability of many pre-trained language models (PLMs); however, a question that remains is how much data is truly needed to fine-tune PLMs for downstream tasks? In this work, we introduce DEFT-UCS, a data-efficient fine-tuning framework that leverages unsupervised core-set selection to identify a smaller, representative dataset to fine-tune PLMs for text-generation needed for text editing tasks such as simplification, grammar correction, clarity, etc. We examine the efficacy of DEFT-UCS across multiple text-editing tasks, and compare to the state-of-the art text-editing model, CoEDIT. Our results demonstrate that DEFT-UCS models are just as accurate as CoEDIT, across eight different datasets consisting of six different editing tasks, while finetuned on 70% less data.

DEFT-UCS: Data Efficient Fine-Tuning for Pre-Trained Language Models via Unsupervised Core-Set Selection

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to generate synthetic data for training and evaluating models. However, it is unclear whether they can generate a good quality of question answering (QA) dataset that incorporates knowledge and cultural nuance embedded in a language, especially for low-resource languages. In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of using LLMs in generating culturally relevant commonsense QA datasets for Indonesian and Sundanese languages. To do so, we create datasets for these languages using various methods involving both LLMs and human annotators, resulting in \~4.5K questions per language (\~9K in total), making our dataset the largest of its kind. Our experiments show that automatic data adaptation from an existing English dataset is less effective for Sundanese. Interestingly, using the direct generation method on the target language, GPT-4 Turbo can generate questions with adequate general knowledge in both languages, albeit not as culturally 'deep' as humans. We also observe a higher occurrence of fluency errors in the Sundanese dataset, highlighting the discrepancy between medium- and lower-resource languages.

Can LLM Generate Culturally Relevant Commonsense QA Data? Case Study in Indonesian and Sundanese

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown superior performance in various applications and fields. To achieve better performance on specialized domains such as law and advertisement, LLMs are often continue pre-trained on in-domain data. However, existing approaches suffer from two major issues. First, in-domain data are scarce compared with general domain-agnostic data. Second, data used for continual pre-training are not task-aware, such that they may not be helpful to downstream applications. We propose TRAIT, a task-oriented in-domain data augmentation framework. Our framework is divided into two parts: in-domain data selection and task-oriented synthetic passage generation. The data selection strategy identifies and selects a large amount of in-domain data from general corpora, and thus significantly enriches domain knowledge in the continual pre-training data. The synthetic passages contain guidance on how to use domain knowledge to answer questions about downstream tasks. By training on such passages, the model aligns with the need of downstream applications. We adapt LLMs to two domains: advertisement and math. On average, TRAIT improves LLM performance by 8% in the advertisement domain and 7.5% in the math domain.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

DetoxLLM: A Framework for Detoxification with Explanations

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Read to Hear: A Zero-Shot Pronunciation Assessment Using Textual Descriptions and LLMs