United States

Model editing aims to correct outdated or erroneous knowledge in large language models (LLMs) without the need for costly retraining. Lifelong model editing is the most challenging task that caters to the continuous editing requirements of LLMs. Prior works primarily focus on single or batch editing; nevertheless, these methods fall short in lifelong editing scenarios due to catastrophic knowledge forgetting and the degradation of model performance. Although retrieval-based methods alleviate these issues, they are impeded by slow and cumbersome processes of integrating the retrieved knowledge into the model. In this work, we introduce RECIPE, a RetriEval-augmented ContInuous Prompt lEarning method, to boost editing efficacy and inference efficiency in lifelong learning. RECIPE first converts knowledge statements into short and informative continuous prompts, prefixed to the LLM&#39;s input query embedding, to efficiently refine the response grounded on the knowledge. It further integrates the Knowledge Sentinel (KS) that acts as an intermediary to calculate a dynamic threshold, determining whether the retrieval repository contains relevant knowledge. Our retriever and prompt encoder are jointly trained to achieve editing properties, i.e., reliability, generality, and locality. In our experiments, RECIPE is assessed extensively across multiple LLMs and editing datasets, where it achieves superior editing performance. RECIPE also demonstrates its capability to maintain the overall performance of LLMs alongside showcasing fast editing and inference speed.

EMNLP 2024

Lifelong Knowledge Editing for LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Continuous Prompt Learning

large language model; pre-training; efficiency

## 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.

Model editing aims to correct outdated or erroneous knowledge in large language models (LLMs) without the need for costly retraining. Lifelong model editing is the most challenging task that caters to the continuous editing requirements of LLMs. Prior works primarily focus on single or batch editing; nevertheless, these methods fall short in lifelong editing scenarios due to catastrophic knowledge forgetting and the degradation of model performance. Although retrieval-based methods alleviate these issues, they are impeded by slow and cumbersome processes of integrating the retrieved knowledge into the model. In this work, we introduce RECIPE, a RetriEval-augmented ContInuous Prompt lEarning method, to boost editing efficacy and inference efficiency in lifelong learning. RECIPE first converts knowledge statements into short and informative continuous prompts, prefixed to the LLM's input query embedding, to efficiently refine the response grounded on the knowledge. It further integrates the Knowledge Sentinel (KS) that acts as an intermediary to calculate a dynamic threshold, determining whether the retrieval repository contains relevant knowledge. Our retriever and prompt encoder are jointly trained to achieve editing properties, i.e., reliability, generality, and locality. In our experiments, RECIPE is assessed extensively across multiple LLMs and editing datasets, where it achieves superior editing performance. RECIPE also demonstrates its capability to maintain the overall performance of LLMs alongside showcasing fast editing and inference speed.

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.

Universal Dependencies (UD) is a global initiative to create a standard annotation for the dependency syntax of human languages. Addressing its deviation from typological principles, this study presents an empirical investigation of a typologically motivated transformation of UD proposed by William Croft. Our findings underscore the significance of the transformations across diverse languages and highlight their advantages and limitations.

Contribution of Linguistic Typology to Universal Dependency Parsing: An Empirical Investigation

Recently, there has been a growing interest in studying how to construct better code instruction tuning data. However, we observe Code models trained with these datasets exhibit high performance on HumanEval but perform worse on other benchmarks such as LiveCodeBench. Upon further investigation, we find that many datasets suffer from severe data leakage. After cleaning up most of the leaked data, some well-known high-quality datasets perform poorly. This discovery reveals a new challenge: identifying which dataset genuinely qualify as high-quality code instruction data. To address this, we propose an efficient code data pruning strategy for selecting good samples. Our approach is based on three dimensions: instruction complexity, response quality, and instruction diversity. Based on our selected data, we present XCoder, a family of models finetuned from LLaMA3. Our experiments show Xcoder achieves new state-of-the-art performance using fewer training data, which verify the effectiveness of our data strategy. Moreover, we perform a comprehensive analysis on the data composition and find existing code datasets have different characteristics according to their construction methods, which provide new insights for future code LLMs.

How Do Your Code LLMs perform? Empowering Code Instruction Tuning with Really Good Data

Explicit multi-step reasoning, such as chain-of-thought, is widely adopted in the community to explore the better performance of language models (LMs). We report on the systematic strategy that LMs use in this process.
Our controlled experiments reveal that LMs rely more heavily on heuristics, such as lexical overlap, in the earlier stages of reasoning when more steps are required to reach an answer. 
Conversely, their reliance on heuristics decreases as LMs progress closer to the final answer. 
This suggests that LMs track only a limited number of future steps and dynamically combine heuristic strategies with rational ones in solving tasks involving multi-step reasoning.

First Heuristic Then Rational: Dynamic Use of Heuristics in Language Model Reasoning

Contrastively trained vision-language models such as CLIP have achieved remarkable progress in vision and language representation learning. Despite the promising progress, their proficiency in compositional reasoning over attributes and relations (e.g., distinguishing between "the car is underneath the person" and "the person is underneath the car") remains notably inadequate. We investigate the cause for this deficient behavior is the composition attribution issue, where the attribution scores (e.g., attention scores or GradCAM scores) for relations (e.g., underneath) or attributes (e.g., red) in the text are substantially lower than those for object terms. In this work, we show such issue is mitigated via a novel framework called CAE (Composition Attribution Enhancement). This generic framework incorporates various interpretable attribution methods to encourage the model to pay greater attention to composition words denoting relationships and attributes within the text. Detailed analysis shows that our approach enables the models to adjust and rectify the attribution of the texts. Extensive experiments across seven benchmarks reveal that our framework significantly enhances the ability to discern intricate details and construct more sophisticated interpretations of combined visual and linguistic elements.

Interpretable Composition Attribution Enhancement for Visio-linguistic Compositional Understanding

In recent years, numerous studies have sought to enhance the capabilities of pretrained language models (PLMs) for Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) tasks by integrating structural information from knowledge graphs. 
However, existing approaches have not effectively combined the structural attributes of knowledge graphs with the textual descriptions of entities to generate robust entity encodings.
To address this issue, this paper proposes MoCoKGC (Momentum Contrast Entity Encoding for Knowledge Graph Completion), which incorporates three primary encoders: the entity-relation encoder, the entity encoder, and the momentum entity encoder. 
Momentum contrastive learning not only provides more negative samples but also allows for the gradual updating of entity encodings. 
Consequently, we reintroduce the generated entity encodings into the encoder to incorporate the graph's structural information.
Additionally, MoCoKGC enhances the inferential capabilities of the entity-relation encoder through deep prompts of relations. 
On the standard evaluation metric, Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), the MoCoKGC model demonstrates superior performance, achieving a 7.1\% improvement on the WN18RR dataset and an 11\% improvement on the Wikidata5M dataset, while also surpassing the current best model on the FB15k-237 dataset. 
Through a series of experiments, this paper thoroughly examines the role and contribution of each component and parameter of the model.

MoCoKGC: Momentum Contrast Entity Encoding for Knowledge Graph Completion

This paper addresses the task of Chinese Lexical Simplification (CLS). 
A key challenge in CLS is the scarcity of data resources. 
We begin by evaluating the performance of various language models at different scales in unsupervised and few-shot settings, finding that their effectiveness is sensitive to word types. 
Expensive large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, outperform small models in simplifying complex content words and Chinese idioms from the dictionary.
To take advantage of this, we propose an automatic knowledge distillation framework called PivotKD for generating training data to fine-tune small models.
In addition, all models face difficulties with out-of-dictionary (OOD) words such as internet slang.
To address this, we implement a retrieval-based interpretation augmentation (RIA) strategy, injecting word interpretations from external resources into the context.
Experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuned small models outperform GPT-4 in simplifying complex content words and Chinese idioms. Additionally, the RIA strategy enhances the performance of most models, particularly in handling OOD words. Our findings suggest that a hybrid approach could optimize CLS performance while managing inference costs. This would involve configuring choices such as model scale, linguistic resources, and the use of RIA based on specific word types to strike an ideal balance.

Optimizing Chinese Lexical Simplification Across Word Types: A Hybrid Approach

Large Language Models (LLMs) can interact with the real world by connecting with versatile external APIs, resulting in better problem-solving and task automation capabilities. Previous research primarily either focuses on APIs with limited arguments from a single source or overlooks the complex dependency relationship between different APIs. However, it is essential to utilize multiple APIs collaboratively from various sources, especially for complex user instructions. In this paper, we introduce \texttt{MetaBench}, the first benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to plan and execute multiple APIs from various sources in order to complete the user's task. Specifically, we consider two significant challenges in multiple APIs: 1) graph structures: some APIs can be executed independently while others need to be executed one by one, resulting in graph-like execution order; and 2) permission constraints: which source is authorized to execute the API call. We have experimental results on 9 distinct LLMs; e.g., GPT-4o achieves only a 2.0% success rate at the most complex instruction, revealing that the existing state-of-the-art LLMs still cannot perform well in this situation even with the help of in-context learning and finetuning. Our code and data are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/ruleGreen/AppBench}.

MetaBench: Planning of Multiple APIs from Various APPs for Complex User Instruction

Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) aims to predict spoken content by analyzing lip movements in videos. Recently reported state-of-the-art results in VSR often rely on increasingly large amounts of video data, while the publicly available transcribed video datasets are insufficient compared to the audio data. To further enhance the VSR model using the audio data, we employed a generative model for data inflation, integrating the synthetic data with the authentic visual data. Essentially, the generative model incorporates another insight, which enhances the capabilities of the recognition model. For the cross-language issue, previous work has shown poor performance with non-Indo-European languages. We trained a multi-language-family modal fusion model, AudioVSR. Leveraging the concept of modal transfer, we achieved significant results in downstream VSR tasks under conditions of data scarcity. To the best of our knowledge, AudioVSR represents the first work on cross-language-family audio-lip alignment, achieving a new SOTA in the cross-language scenario.

AudioVSR: Enhancing Video Speech Recognition with Audio Data

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is a crucial cross-modal task that objectively evaluates the capabilities of language understanding, image comprehension, and language-to-image grounding. Consequently, it serves as an ideal testing ground for Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In pursuit of this goal, we have established a new REC dataset characterized by two key features: Firstly, it is designed with controllable varying levels of difficulty, necessitating multi-level fine-grained reasoning across object categories, attributes, and multi-hop relationships. Secondly, it includes negative text and images created through fine-grained editing and generation based on existing data, thereby testing the model's ability to correctly reject scenarios where the target object is not visible in the image—an essential aspect often overlooked in existing datasets and approaches. Utilizing this high-quality dataset, we conducted comprehensive evaluations of both state-of-the-art specialist models and MLLMs. Our findings indicate that there remains a significant gap in achieving satisfactory grounding performance. We anticipate that our dataset will inspire new approaches to enhance visual reasoning and develop more advanced cross-modal interaction strategies, ultimately unlocking the full potential of MLLMs.

FineCops-Ref: A new Dataset and Task for Fine-Grained Compositional Referring Expression Comprehension

To enhance the reasoning capabilities of off-the-shelf Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce a simple, yet general and effective prompting method, RE2, i.e., Re-Reading the question as input. Unlike most thought-eliciting prompting methods, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), which aim to elicit the reasoning process in the output, RE2 shifts the focus to the input by processing questions twice, thereby enhancing the understanding process. Consequently, RE2 demonstrates strong generality and compatibility with most thought-eliciting prompting methods, including CoT. Crucially, RE2 facilitates a "bidirectional" encoding in unidirectional decoder-only LLMs because the first pass could provide global information for the second pass. We begin with a preliminary empirical study as the foundation of RE2, illustrating its potential to enable "bidirectional" attention mechanisms. We then evaluate RE2 on extensive reasoning benchmarks across 14 datasets, spanning 112 experiments, to validate its effectiveness and generality. Our findings indicate that, with the exception of a few scenarios on vanilla ChatGPT, RE2 consistently enhances the reasoning performance of LLMs through a simple re-reading strategy. Further analyses reveal RE2's adaptability, showing how it can be effectively integrated with different LLMs, thought-eliciting prompting, and ensemble strategies.

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Contribution of Linguistic Typology to Universal Dependency Parsing: An Empirical Investigation

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