United States

Continual Event Detection (CED) poses a formidable challenge due to the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon, where learning new tasks (with new coming event types) hampers performance on previous ones. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, Lifelong Event Detection via Optimal Transport (**LEDOT**), that leverages optimal transport principles to align the optimization of our classification module with the intrinsic nature of each class, as defined by their pre-trained language modeling. Our method integrates replay sets, prototype latent representations, and an innovative Optimal Transport component. Extensive experiments on MAVEN and ACE datasets demonstrate LEDOT&#39;s superior performance, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. The results underscore LEDOT as a pioneering solution in continual event detection, offering a more effective and nuanced approach to addressing catastrophic forgetting in evolving environments.

EMNLP 2024

Lifelong Event Detection via Optimal Transport

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research execution

agents

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*

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Please register!

NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Continual Event Detection (CED) poses a formidable challenge due to the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon, where learning new tasks (with new coming event types) hampers performance on previous ones. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, Lifelong Event Detection via Optimal Transport (**LEDOT**), that leverages optimal transport principles to align the optimization of our classification module with the intrinsic nature of each class, as defined by their pre-trained language modeling. Our method integrates replay sets, prototype latent representations, and an innovative Optimal Transport component. Extensive experiments on MAVEN and ACE datasets demonstrate LEDOT's superior performance, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. The results underscore LEDOT as a pioneering solution in continual event detection, offering a more effective and nuanced approach to addressing catastrophic forgetting in evolving environments.

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.

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.

Activation Editing, which involves directly editting the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) to alter their behavior and achieve desired properties, has emerged as a promising area of research. Existing works primarily treat LLMs' activations as points in space and modify them by adding steering vectors. We show that doing so would break the magnitude consistency of the activation vectors in LLMs. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose a novel editing method that views activations in terms of their directions and magnitudes. Our method, which we name Householder Pseudo-Rotation (HPR), mimics the rotation transformation, thus preserving activation norm and resulting in an improved performance on various safety benchmarks.

Householder Pseudo-Rotation: A Novel Approach to Activation Editing in LLMs with Direction-Magnitude Perspective

Fallacies are defective arguments with faulty reasoning. Detecting and classifying them is a crucial NLP task to prevent misinformation, manipulative claims, and biased decisions. However, existing fallacy classifiers are limited by the requirement for sufficient labeled data for training, which hinders their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization abilities. In this paper, we focus on leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for zero-shot fallacy classification. To elicit fallacy-related knowledge and reasoning abilities of LLMs, we propose diverse single-round and multi-round prompting schemes, applying different taskspecific instructions such as extraction, summarization, and Chain-of-Thought reasoning. With comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we suggest that LLMs could be potential zero-shot fallacy classifiers. In general, LLMs under single-round prompting schemes have achieved acceptable zeroshot performances compared to the best fullshot baselines and can outperform them in all OOD inference scenarios and some opendomain tasks. Our novel multi-round prompting schemes can effectively bring about more improvements, especially for small LLMs. Our analysis further underlines the future research on zero-shot fallacy classification. Codes and data are available at: https://github.com/panFJCharlotte98/Fallacy_Detection.

Are LLMs Good Zero-Shot Fallacy Classifiers?

Large language model (LLM) training and finetuning are often bottlenecked by limited GPU memory. While existing projection-based optimization methods address this by projecting gradients into a lower-dimensional subspace to reduce optimizer state memory, they typically rely on $\textit{dense}$ projection matrices, which can introduce computational and memory overheads. In this work, we propose Grass (GRAdient Stuctured Sparsification), a novel approach that leverages $\textit{sparse}$ projections to transform gradients into structured sparse updates. This design not only significantly reduces memory usage for optimizer states but also minimizes gradient memory footprint, computation, and communication costs, leading to substantial throughput improvements. Extensive experiments on pretraining and finetuning tasks demonstrate that Grass achieves comparable performance to full-rank training and existing projection-based methods. Notably, Grass enables half-precision pretraining of a 13B parameter LLaMA model on a single 40GB A100 GPU---a feat infeasible for previous methods---and yields up to a $2\times$ throughput improvement on an 8-GPU system.

GRASS: Compute Efficient Low-Memory LLM Training with Structured Sparse Gradients

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer missing or incomplete parts in knowledge graph. The existing models are generally divided into structure-based and description-based models, among description-based models often require longer training and inference times as well as increased memory usage. In this paper, we propose Pre-Encoded Masked Language Model (PEMLM) to efficiently solve KGC problem. By encoding textual descriptions into semantic representations before training, the necessary resources are significantly reduced. Furthermore, we introduce a straightforward but effective fusion framework to integrate structural embedding with pre-encoded semantic description, which enhances the model's prediction performance on 1-N relations. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed strategy attains state-of-the-art performance on the WN18RR (MRR+5.4% and Hits@1+6.4%) and UMLS datasets. Compared to existing models, we have increased inference speed by 30x and reduced training memory by approximately 60%.

Joint Pre-Encoding Representation and Structure Embedding for Efficient and Low-Resource Knowledge Graph Completion

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the domain of natural language processing because of their excellent performance on various tasks. Despite their impressive capabilities, LLMs also have the potential to generate texts that pose risks of misuse. Consequently, detecting LLM-generated text has become increasingly important.
Previous LLM-generated text detection methods use semantic features, which are stored in the last layer. This leads to methods that overfit the training set domain and exhibit shortcomings in generalization. Therefore, We argue that utilizing intrinsic features rather than semantic features for detection results in better performance.
In this work, we design Text Fluoroscopy, a black-box method with better generalizability for detecting LLM-generated text by mining the intrinsic features of the text to be detected. 
Our method captures the text's intrinsic features by identifying the layer with the largest distribution difference from the last and first layers when projected to the vocabulary space.
Our method achieves 7.36\% and 2.84\% average improvement in detection performance compared to the baselines in detecting texts from different domains generated by GPT-4 and Claude3, respectively.

Text Fluoroscopy: Detecting LLM-Generated Text through Intrinsic Features

Text summarization, a key natural language generation (NLG) task, is vital in various domains. However, the high cost of inaccurate summaries in risk-critical applications, particularly those involving human-in-the-loop decision-making, raises concerns about the reliability of uncertainty estimation on text summarization (UE-TS) evaluation methods. This concern stems from the dependency of uncertainty model metrics on diverse and potentially conflicting NLG metrics. To address this issue, we introduce a comprehensive UE-TS benchmark incorporating 31 NLG metrics across four dimensions. The benchmark evaluates the uncertainty estimation capabilities of two large language models and one pre-trained language model on three datasets, with human-annotation analysis incorporated where applicable. We also assess the performance of 14 common uncertainty estimation methods within this benchmark. Our findings emphasize the importance of considering multiple uncorrelated NLG metrics and diverse uncertainty estimation methods to ensure reliable and efficient evaluation of UE-TS techniques. Our code and data are available: https://github.com/he159ok/Benchmark-of-Uncertainty-Estimation-Methods-in-Text-Summarization.

Can We Trust the Performance Evaluation of Uncertainty Estimation Methods in Text Summarization?

In this study, we introduce ANGST, a novel, first of its kind benchmark for depression-anxiety comorbidity classification from social media posts. Unlike contemporary datasets that often oversimplify the intricate interplay between different mental health disorders by treating them as isolated conditions, ANGST enables multi-label classification, allowing each post to be simultaneously identified as indicating depression and/or anxiety. Comprising 2876 meticulously annotated posts by expert psychologists and an additional 7667 silver-labeled posts, ANGST posits a more representative sample of online mental health discourse. Moreover, we benchmark ANGST using various state-of-the-art language models, ranging from Mental-BERT to GPT-4. Our results provide significant insights into the capabilities and limitations of these models in complex diagnostic scenarios. While GPT-4 generally outperforms other models, none achieve an F1 score exceeding 72% in multi-class comorbid classification, underscoring the ongoing challenges in applying language models to mental health diagnostics.

Still Not Quite There! Assessing Large Language Models for Comorbid Mental Health Diagnosis

We introduce a novel tagging scheme for discontinuous named entity recognition based on an explicit description of the inner structure of discontinuous mentions. We rely on a weighted finite state automaton for both marginal and maximum a posteriori inference. As such, our method is sound in the sense that (1) well-formedness of predicted tag sequences is ensured via the automaton structure and (2) there is an unambiguous mapping between well-formed sequences of tags and (discontinuous) mentions. We evaluate our approach on three English datasets in the biomedical domain, and report comparable results to state-of-the-art while having a way simpler and faster model.

A Fast and Sound Tagging Method for Discontinuous Named-Entity Recognition

Text-to-image prompt refinement (T2I-Refine) aims to rephrase or extend an input prompt with more descriptive details that can be leveraged to generate images with higher quality. In this paper, we study an adversarial prompt attacking problem for T2I-Refine, where to goal is to implicitly inject specific concept bias to the input prompts during the refinement process so that the generated images, still with higher quality, are explicitly biased to the target group. Our study is motivated by the limitation of current T2I-Refine research that lacks of explorations on the potential capacity of T2I-Refine models to provide prompt refinement service in a biased or advertising manner. To address the limitations, we develop RAt, a prompt refinement and attacking framework that attacks input prompts with intentionally selected adversarial replacements by optimizing a token distribution matrix based on the text-to-image finetuning strategy with a token-level bias obfuscation loss as regularization. We evaluate RAt on a large-scale text-to-image dataset with various concepts as target in both in-domain and transfer-domain scenarios. The evaluation results demonstrate that, compared to other T2I-Refine schemes, RAt is well capable of implicitly attacking input prompts to generate images with higher quality and explicit visual bias towards specific concept group.

RAt: Injecting Implicit Bias for Text-To-Image Prompt Refinement Models

State-of-the-art trainable machine translation evaluation metrics like xCOMET achieve high correlation with human judgment but rely on large encoders (up to 10.7B parameters), making them computationally expensive and inaccessible to researchers with limited resources. To address this issue, we investigate whether the knowledge stored in these large encoders can be compressed while maintaining quality. We employ distillation, quantization, and pruning techniques to create efficient xCOMET alternatives and introduce a novel data collection pipeline for efficient black-box distillation. Our experiments show that, using quantization, xCOMET can be compressed up to three times with no quality degradation. Additionally, through distillation, we create an 278M-sized xCOMET-lite metric, which has only 2.6% of xCOMET-XXL parameters, but retains 92.1% of its quality. Besides, it surpasses strong small-scale metrics like COMET-22 and BLEURT-20 on the WMT22 metrics challenge dataset by 6.4%, despite using 50% fewer parameters. All code, dataset, and models are available online.

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Householder Pseudo-Rotation: A Novel Approach to Activation Editing in LLMs with Direction-Magnitude Perspective

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