United States

Citation Prediction, estimating whether paper a cites paper b, is particularly interesting in a forecasting setting where the model is trained on papers published before time t, and evaluated on papers published after h, where h is the forecast horizon. 
Performance improves with t (larger training sets) and degrades with h (longer forecast horizons). 
The trade-off between edge-based methods and node-based methods depends on t. 
Because edges grow faster than nodes, larger training sets favor edge-based methods.
We introduce a new forecast-based Citation Prediction benchmark of 3 million papers to quantify these trends.
Our benchmark shows that desirable policies for combining edge- and node-based methods depend on h and t.
We release our benchmark, evaluation scripts, and embeddings.

EMNLP 2024

Comparing Edge-based and Node-based Methods on a Citation Prediction Task

early exits

domain adaptation

adversarial training

### 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.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

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.
### [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.

Meeting summarization has become a critical task considering the increase in online interactions. Despite new techniques being proposed regularly, the evaluation of meeting summarization techniques relies on metrics not tailored to capture meeting-specific errors, leading to ineffective assessment. This paper explores what established automatic metrics capture and the errors they mask by correlating metric scores with human evaluations across a comprehensive error taxonomy. We start by reviewing the literature on English meeting summarization to identify key challenges, such as speaker dynamics and contextual turn-taking, and error types, including missing information and linguistic inaccuracy, concepts previously loosely defined in the field. We then examine the relationship between these challenges and errors using human annotated transcripts and summaries from encoder-decoder-based and autoregressive Transformer models on the QMSum dataset. Experiments reveal that different model architectures respond variably to the challenges, resulting in distinct links between challenges and errors. Current established metrics struggle to capture the observable errors, showing weak to moderate correlations, with a third of the correlations indicating error masking. Only a subset of metrics accurately reacts to specific errors, while most correlations show either unresponsiveness or failure to reflect the error's impact on summary quality.

What’s under the hood: Investigating Automatic Metrics on Meeting Summarization

We introduce *event-keyed summarization* (EKS), a novel task that marries traditional summarization and document-level event extraction, with the goal of generating a contextualized summary for a specific event, given a document and an extracted event structure. We introduce a dataset for this task, MUCSUM, consisting of summaries of all events in the classic MUC-4 dataset, along with a set of baselines that comprises both pretrained LM standards in the summarization literature, as well as larger frontier models. We show that ablations that reduce EKS to traditional summarization or structure-to-text yield inferior summaries of target events and that MUCSUM is a robust benchmark for this task. Lastly, we conduct a human evaluation of both reference and model summaries, and provide some detailed analysis of the results.

Event-Keyed Summarization

We present a new approach called MeritOpt based on the Personalized Federated Learning algorithm MeritFed that can be applied to Natural Language Tasks with heterogeneous data. We evaluate it on the Low-Resource Machine Translation task, using the datasets of South East Asian and Finno-Ugric languages. In addition to its effectiveness, MeritOpt is also highly interpretable, as it can be applied to track the impact of each language used for training. Our analysis reveals that target dataset size affects weight distribution across auxiliary languages, that unrelated languages do not interfere with the training, and auxiliary optimizer parameters have minimal impact. Our approach is easy to apply with a few lines of code, and we provide scripts for reproducing the experiments (https://github.com/VityaVitalich/MeritOpt).

Low-Resource Machine Translation through the Lens of Personalized Federated Learning

Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) is a critical task for designing effective retrieval-based Question Answering (QA) systems. Most advancements in AS2 focus on English due to the scarcity of annotated datasets for other languages. This lack of resources prevents the training of effective AS2 models in different languages, creating a performance gap between QA systems in English and other locales. In this paper, we introduce new high-quality datasets for AS2 in five European languages (French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish), obtained through supervised Automatic Machine Translation (AMT) of existing English AS2 datasets such as ASNQ, WikiQA, and TREC-QA using a Large Language Model (LLM). We evaluated our approach and the quality of the translated datasets through multiple experiments with different Transformer architectures. The results indicate that our datasets are pivotal in producing robust and powerful multilingual AS2 models, significantly contributing to closing the performance gap between English and other languages.

Datasets for Multilingual Answer Sentence Selection

Emotion Recognition in conversations (ERC) involves an internal cognitive process that interprets emotional cues by using a collection of past emotional experiences. However, many existing methods struggle to decipher emotional cues in dialogues since they are insufficient in understanding the rich historical emotional context. In this work, we introduce an innovative Detective Network (DetectiveNN), a novel model that is grounded in the cognitive theory of emotion and utilizes a "recall-detect-predict" framework to imitate human emotional reasoning. This process begins by 'recalling' past interactions of a specific speaker to collect emotional cues. It then 'detects' relevant emotional patterns by interpreting these cues in the context of the ongoing conversation. Finally, it 'predicts' the speaker's current emotional state. Tested on three benchmark datasets, our approach significantly outperforms existing methods. This highlights the advantages of incorporating cognitive factors into deep learning for ERC, enhancing task efficacy and prediction accuracy.

DetectiveNN: Imitating Human Emotional Reasoning with a Recall-Detect-Predict Framework for Emotion Recognition in Conversations

As a type of figurative language, an East Asian idiom condenses rich cultural background into only a few characters. Translating such idioms is challenging for human translators, who often resort to choosing a context-aware translation from an existing list of candidates. However, compiling a dictionary of candidate translations demands much time and creativity even for expert translators. To alleviate such burden, we evaluate if GPT-4 can help generate high-quality translations. Based on automatic evaluations of faithfulness and creativity, we first identify Pareto-optimal prompting strategies that can outperform translation engines from Google and DeepL. Then, at a low cost, our context-aware translations can achieve far more high-quality translations per idiom than the human baseline. We open-source all code and data to facilitate further research.

Creative and Context-Aware Translation of East Asian Idioms with GPT-4

Sentiment analysis (SA) aims to identify the sentiment expressed in a piece of text, often in the form of a review. Assuming a review and the sentiment associated with it, in this paper we formulate SA as a combination of two tasks: (1) a causal discovery task that distinguishes whether a review “primes” the sentiment (Causal Hypothesis C1), or the sentiment “primes” the review (Causal Hypothesis C2); and (2) the traditional prediction task to model the sentiment using the review as input. Using the peak-end rule in psychology, we classify a sample as C1 if its overall sentiment score approximates an average of all the sentence-level sentiments in the review, and as C2 if the overall sentiment score approximates an average of the peak and end sentiments. For the prediction task, we use the discovered causal mechanisms behind the samples to improve the performance of LLMs by proposing causal prompts that give the models an inductive bias of the underlying causal graph, leading to substantial improvements by up to 32.13 F1 points on zero-shot five-class SA.

On the Causal Nature of Sentiment Analysis

Existing metrics for evaluating the factuality of long-form text, such as FACTSCORE (Min et al., 2023) and SAFE (Wei et al., 2024), decompose an input text into “atomic claims” and verify each against a knowledge base like Wikipedia. These metrics are not suitable for most generation tasks because they assume that every claim is verifiable (i.e., can plausibly be proven true or false). We address this issue with VERISCORE,1 a metric for evaluating factuality in diverse long-form generation tasks that contain both verifiable and unverifiable content. VERISCORE can be effectively implemented with either closed or fine-tuned open-weight language models. Human evaluation confirms that VERISCORE’s extracted claims are more sensible than those from competing methods across eight different long-form tasks. We use VERISCORE to evaluate generations from 16 different models across multiple long-form tasks and find that while GPT-4o is the best-performing model overall, open-weight models such as Mixtral-8×22 are closing the gap. We show that an LM’s VERISCORE on one task (e.g., biography generation) does not necessarily correlate to its VERISCORE on a different task (e.g., long-form QA), highlighting the need for expanding factuality evaluation across tasks with varying fact density.

VeriScore: Evaluating the factuality of verifiable claims in long-form text generation

Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have impacted numerous sub-fields such as natural language generation, natural language inference, question answering, and more. However, in the field of question generation, the creation of distractors for multiple-choice questions (MCQ) remains a challenging task. In this work, we present a simple, generic framework for distractor generation using readily available Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Unlike previous methods, our framework relies solely on pre-trained language models and does not require additional training on specific datasets. Building upon previous research, we introduce a two-stage framework consisting of candidate generation and candidate selection. Our proposed distractor generation framework outperforms previous methods without the need for training or fine-tuning. Human evaluations confirm that our approach produces more effective and engaging distractors. The related codebase is publicly available at https://github.com/obss/disgem.

DisGeM: Distractor Generation for Multiple Choice Questions with Span Masking

With the continuous growth of online communities, understanding their similarities and dissimilarities is more crucial than ever for enhancing digital interactions, maintaining healthy interactions, and improving content recommendation and moderation systems. In this work, we present two novel techniques: BOTS for finding similarity between online communities based on their opinion, and Emb-PSR for finding similarity in the content they post. To facilitate finding the similarity based on opinion, we model the opinions on online communities using upvotes and downvotes as an indicator for community approval. Our results demonstrate that BOTS and Emb-PSR outperform existing techniques at their individual tasks while also being flexible enough to allow for cross-platform comparison of online communities. We demonstrate this novel cross-platform capability by comparing GAB with various subreddits.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

What’s under the hood: Investigating Automatic Metrics on Meeting Summarization

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