United States

Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) constitutes a critical research direction in computational linguistics and serves as a key indicator of the encoding capabilities of embedding models. Driven by advances in pre-trained language models and contrastive learning, leading sentence representation methods have reached an average Spearman&#39;s correlation score of approximately 86 across seven STS benchmarks in SentEval. However, further progress has become increasingly marginal, with no existing method attaining an average score higher than 86.5 on these tasks. This paper conducts an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon and concludes that the upper limit for Spearman&#39;s correlation scores under contrastive learning is 87.5. To transcend this ceiling, we propose an innovative approach termed Pcc-tuning, which employs Pearson&#39;s correlation coefficient as a loss function to refine model performance beyond contrastive learning. Experimental results demonstrate that Pcc-tuning can markedly surpass previous state-of-the-art strategies with only a minimal amount of fine-grained annotated samples.

EMNLP 2024

Pcc-tuning: Breaking the Contrastive Learning Ceiling in Semantic Textual Similarity

multilingual semantic parsing

multilingual representation

data augmentation

cross-lingual transfer

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) constitutes a critical research direction in computational linguistics and serves as a key indicator of the encoding capabilities of embedding models. Driven by advances in pre-trained language models and contrastive learning, leading sentence representation methods have reached an average Spearman's correlation score of approximately 86 across seven STS benchmarks in SentEval. However, further progress has become increasingly marginal, with no existing method attaining an average score higher than 86.5 on these tasks. This paper conducts an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon and concludes that the upper limit for Spearman's correlation scores under contrastive learning is 87.5. To transcend this ceiling, we propose an innovative approach termed Pcc-tuning, which employs Pearson's correlation coefficient as a loss function to refine model performance beyond contrastive learning. Experimental results demonstrate that Pcc-tuning can markedly surpass previous state-of-the-art strategies with only a minimal amount of fine-grained annotated samples.

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.

Advances in dataset analysis techniques have enabled more sophisticated approaches to analyzing and characterizing training data instances, often categorizing data based on attributes such as ``difficulty''. 
In this work, we introduce RepMatch, a novel method that characterizes data through the lens of similarity.
RepMatch quantifies the similarity between subsets of training instances by comparing the knowledge encoded in models trained on them, overcoming the limitations of existing analysis methods that focus solely on individual instances and are restricted to within-dataset analysis.
Our framework allows for a broader evaluation, enabling similarity comparisons across arbitrary subsets of instances, supporting both dataset-to-dataset and instance-to-dataset analyses. We validate the effectiveness of RepMatch across multiple NLP tasks, datasets, and models. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that RepMatch can effectively compare datasets, identify more representative subsets of a dataset (that lead to better performance than randomly selected subsets of equivalent size), and uncover heuristics underlying the construction of some challenge datasets.

RepMatch: Quantifying Cross-Instance Similarities in Representation Space

Classification is a core NLP task architecture with many potential applications. While large language models (LLMs) have brought substantial advancements in text generation, their potential for enhancing classification tasks remains underexplored. To address this gap, we propose a framework for thoroughly investigating fine-tuning LLMs for classification, including both generation- and encoding-based approaches. We instantiate this framework in edit intent classification (EIC), a challenging and underexplored classification task. Our extensive experiments and systematic comparisons with various training approaches and a representative selection of LLMs yield new insights into their application for EIC. We investigate the generalizability of these findings on five further classification tasks. To demonstrate the proposed methods and address the data shortage for empirical edit analysis, we use our best-performing EIC model to create Re3-Sci2.0, a new large-scale dataset of 1,780 scientific document revisions with over 94k labeled edits. The quality of the dataset is assessed through human evaluation. The new dataset enables an in-depth empirical study of human editing behavior in academic writing. We make our experimental framework, models and data publicly available.

Are Large Language Models Good Classifiers? A Study on Edit Intent Classification in Scientific Document Revisions

Table entity linking (TEL) aims to map entity mentions in the table to their corresponding entities in a knowledge base (KB). The core of this task is to leverage structured contexts, specifically row and column contexts, to enhance the semantics of mentions in entity disambiguation. Most entity linking (EL) methods primarily focus on understanding sequential text contexts, making it difficult to adapt to the row and column structure of tables. Additionally, existing methods for TEL indiscriminately mix row and column contexts together, overlooking their semantic differences. In this paper, we explicitly distinguish the modeling of row and column contexts, and propose a method called RoCEL to capture their distinct semantics. Specifically, for row contexts in tables, we take the attention mechanism to learn the implicit relational dependencies between each cell and the mention. For column contexts in tables, we employ a set-wise encoder to learn the categorical information about the group of mentions. At last, we merge both contexts to obtain the final mention embedding for link prediction. Experiments on four benchmarks show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) baseline by about 1.5% on the in-domain dataset, and by 3.7% on average across three out-of-domain datasets.

RoCEL: Advancing Table Entity Linking through Distinctive Row and Column Contexts

Entity disambiguation (ED) is crucial in natural language processing (NLP) for tasks such as question-answering and information extraction. A major challenge in ED is handling overshadowed entities—uncommon entities sharing mention surfaces with common entities. The current approach to enhance performance on these entities involves reasoning over facts in a knowledge base (KB), increasing computational overhead during inference. We argue that the ED performance on overshadowed entities can be enhanced during training by addressing shortcut learning, which does not add computational overhead at inference. We propose a simple yet effective debiasing technique to prevent models from shortcut learning during training. Experiments on a range of ED datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance without compromising inference speed. Our findings suggest a new research direction for improving entity disambiguation via shortcut learning mitigation.

Efficient Overshadowed Entity Disambiguation by Mitigating Shortcut Learning

Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE) aims to extract relations between entity pairs in a document and poses many challenges as it involves multiple mentions of entities and cross-sentence inference. However, several aspects that are important for DocRE have not been considered and explored. Existing work ignores bidirectional mention interaction when generating relational features for entity pairs. Also, sophisticated neural networks are typically designed for cross-sentence evidence extraction to further enhance DocRE. More interestingly, we reveal a noteworthy finding: If a model has predicted a relation between an entity and other entities, this relation information may help infer and predict more relations between the entity’s adjacent entities and these other entities. Nonetheless, none of existing methods leverage secondary reasoning to exploit results of relation prediction. To this end, we propose a novel Secondary Reasoning Framework (SRF) for DocRE. In SRF, we initially propose a DocRE model that incorporates bidirectional mention fusion and a simple yet effective evidence extraction module (incurring only an additional learnable parameter overhead) for relation prediction. Further, for the first time, we elaborately design and propose a novel secondary reasoning method to discover more relations by exploring the results of the first relation prediction. Extensive experiments show that SRF achieves SOTA performance and our secondary reasoning method is both effective and general when integrated into existing models.

SRF: Enhancing Document-Level Relation Extraction with a Novel Secondary Reasoning Framework

The quality is a crucial issue for crowd annotations. Answer aggregation is an important type of solution. The aggregated answers estimated from multiple crowd answers to the same instance are the eventually collected annotations, rather than the individual crowd answers themselves. Recently, the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) on data annotation tasks has attracted interest from researchers. Most of the existing studies mainly focus on the average performance of individual crowd workers; several recent works studied the scenarios of aggregation on categorical labels and LLMs used as label creators. However, the scenario of aggregation on text answers and the role of LLMs as aggregators are not yet well-studied. In this paper, we investigate the capability of LLMs as aggregators in the scenario of close-ended crowd text answer aggregation. We propose a human-LLM hybrid text answer aggregation method with a Creator-Aggregator Multi-Stage (CAMS) crowdsourcing framework. We make the experiments based on public crowdsourcing datasets. The results show the effectiveness of our approach based on the collaboration of crowd workers and LLMs.

Human-LLM Hybrid Text Answer Aggregation for Crowd Annotations

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has been widely studied and applied in numerous applications. However, the emphasis on brief summary texts during pre-training prevents CLIP from understanding long descriptions. This issue is particularly acute regarding videos given that videos often contain abundant detailed contents. In this paper, we propose the VideoCLIP-XL (eXtra Length) model, which aims to unleash the long-description understanding capability of video CLIP models. Firstly, we establish an automatic data collection system and gather a large-scale VILD pre-training dataset with VIdeo and Long-Description pairs. Then, we propose Text-similarity-guided Primary Component Matching (TPCM) to better learn the distribution of feature space while expanding the long description capability. We also introduce two new tasks namely Detail-aware Description Ranking (DDR) and Hallucination-aware Description Ranking (HDR) for further understanding improvement. Finally, we construct a Long Video Description Ranking (LVDR) benchmark for evaluating the long-description capability more comprehensively. Extensive experimental results on widely-used text-video retrieval benchmarks with both short and long descriptions and our LVDR benchmark can fully demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

VideoCLIP-XL: Advancing Long Description Understanding for Video CLIP Models

Extensive efforts have been made before the public release of Large language models (LLMs) to align their behaviors with human values. However, even meticulously aligned LLMs remain vulnerable to malicious manipulations such as jailbreaking, leading to unintended behaviors. In this work, we propose a novel black-box jailbreak framework for automated red teaming of LLMs. We designed malicious content concealing and memory reframing with an iterative optimization algorithm to jailbreak LLMs, motivated by the research about the distractibility and over-confidence phenomenon of LLMs. Extensive experiments of jailbreaking both open-source and proprietary LLMs demonstrate the superiority of our framework in terms of effectiveness, scalability and transferability. We also evaluate the effectiveness of existing jailbreak defense methods against our attack and highlight the crucial need to develop more effective and practical defense strategies.

Distract Large Language Models for Automatic Jailbreak Attack

The mission of commonsense knowledge graph completion (CKGC) is to infer missing facts from known commonsense knowledge. CKGC methods can be roughly divided into two categories: triple-based methods and text-based methods. Due to the imbalanced distribution of entities and limited structural information, triple-based methods struggle with long-tail entities. Text-based methods alleviate this issue, but require extensive training and fine-tuning of language models, which reduces efficiency. To alleviate these problems, we propose ATAP, the first CKGC framework that utilizes automatically generated continuous prompt templates combined with pre-trained language models (PLMs). Moreover, ATAP uses a carefully designed new prompt template training strategy, guiding PLMs to generate optimal prompt templates for CKGC tasks. Combining the rich knowledge of PLMs with the template automatic augmentation strategy, ATAP effectively mitigates the long-tail problem and enhances CKGC performance. Results on benchmark datasets show that ATAP achieves state-of-the-art performance overall.

ATAP: Automatic Template-Augmented Commonsense Knowledge Graph Completion via Pre-Trained Language Models

Generative language models often struggle with specialized or less-discussed knowledge. A potential solution is found in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models which act like retrieving information before generating responses. In this study, we explore how the \textsc{Atlas} approach, a RAG model, decides between what it already knows (parametric) and what it retrieves (non-parametric). We use causal mediation analysis and controlled experiments to examine how internal representations influence information processing. 
Our findings disentangle the effects of parametric knowledge and the retrieved context. They indicate that in cases where the model can choose between both types of information (parametric and non-parametric), it relies more on the context than the parametric knowledge. Furthermore, the analysis investigates the computations involved in \emph{how} the model uses the information from the context. We find that multiple mechanisms are active within the model and can be detected with mediation analysis: first, the decision of \emph{whether the context is relevant}, and second, how the encoder computes output representations to support copying when relevant.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

RepMatch: Quantifying Cross-Instance Similarities in Representation Space

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