United States

With the rise of globalisation, code-switching (CSW) has become a ubiquitous part of multilingual conversation, posing new challenges for natural language processing (NLP), especially in Grammatical Error Correction (GEC). This work explores the complexities of applying GEC systems to CSW texts. Our objectives include evaluating the performance of state-of-the-art GEC systems on an authentic CSW dataset from English as a Second Language (ESL) learners, exploring synthetic data generation as a solution to data scarcity, and developing a model capable of correcting grammatical errors in monolingual and CSW texts. We generated synthetic CSW GEC data, resulting in one of the first substantial datasets for this task, and showed that a model trained on this data is capable of significant improvements over existing systems. This work targets ESL learners, aiming to provide educational technologies that aid in the development of their English grammatical correctness without constraining their natural multilingualism.

EMNLP 2024

LLM-based Code-Switched Text Generation for Grammatical Error Correction

causal mediation analysis

retrieval-augmented models

model analysis

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

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.

Recent breakthroughs in preference alignment have significantly improved Large Language Models' ability to generate texts that align with human preferences and values. However, current alignment metrics typically emphasize the post-hoc overall improvement, while overlooking a critical aspect: $\textit{regression}$, which refers to the backsliding on previously correctly-handled data after updates. This potential pitfall may arise from excessive fine-tuning on already well-aligned data, which subsequently leads to over-alignment and degeneration. To address this challenge, we propose $\textit{FlipGuard}$, a constrained optimization approach to detect and mitigate update regression with focal attention. Specifically, FlipGuard identifies performance degradation using a customized reward characterization and strategically enforces a constraint to encourage conditional congruence with the pre-aligned model during training. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FlipGuard effectively alleviates update regression while demonstrating excellent overall performance, with the added benefit of knowledge preservation while aligning preferences.

FlipGuard: Defending Preference Alignment against Update Regression with Constrained Optimization

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human expectations requires high-quality instructional dialogues, which can be achieved by raising diverse, in-depth, and insightful instructions that deepen interactions. Existing methods target instructions from real instruction dialogues as a learning goal and fine-tune a user simulator for posing instructions. However, the user simulator struggles to implicitly model complex dialogue flows and pose high-quality instructions. In this paper, we take inspiration from the cognitive abilities inherent in human learning and propose the explicit modeling of complex dialogue flows through instructional strategy reuse. Specifically, we first induce high-level strategies from various real instruction dialogues. These strategies are applied to new dialogue scenarios deductively, where the instructional strategies facilitate high-quality instructions. Experimental results show that our method can generate diverse, in-depth, and insightful instructions for a given dialogue history. The constructed multi-turn instructional dialogues can outperform competitive baselines on the downstream chat model.

Inductive-Deductive Strategy Reuse for Multi-Turn Instructional Dialogues

To handle the vast amounts of qualitative data produced in corporate climate communication, stakeholders increasingly rely on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. However, a significant gap remains in evaluating domain-specific information retrieval -- the basis for answer generation. To address this challenge, this work simulates the typical tasks of a sustainability analyst by examining 30 sustainability reports with 16 detailed climate-related questions. As a result, we obtain a dataset with over 8.5K unique question-source-answer pairs labeled by different levels of relevance. Furthermore, we develop a use case with the dataset to investigate the integration of expert knowledge into information retrieval with embeddings. Although we show that incorporating expert knowledge works, we also outline the critical limitations of embeddings in knowledge-intensive downstream domains like climate change communication.

ClimRetrieve: A Benchmarking Dataset for Information Retrieval from Corporate Climate Disclosures

We develop quantum RNNs with cells based on Parametrised Quantum Circuits (PQCs). PQCs can provide a form of hybrid quantum-classical computation where the input and the output is in the form of classical data. The previous "hidden" state is the quantum state from the previous time-step, and an angle encoding is used to define a (non-linear) mapping from a classical word embedding into the quantum Hilbert space. Measurements of the quantum state provide classical statistics which are used for classification. We report results which are competitive with various RNN baselines on the Rotten Tomatoes dataset, as well as emulator results which demonstrate the feasibility of running such models on quantum hardware.

Quantum Recurrent Architectures for Text Classification

Knowledge distillation (KD) is known as a promising solution to compress large language models (LLMs) via transferring their knowledge to smaller models. During this process, white-box KD methods usually minimize the distance between the output distributions of the two models so that more knowledge can be transferred. However, in the current white-box KD framework, the output distributions are from the respective output spaces of the two models, using their own prediction heads. We argue that the space discrepancy will lead to low similarity between the teacher model and the student model on both representation and distribution levels. Furthermore, this discrepancy also hinders the KD process between models with different vocabularies, which is common for current LLMs. To address these issues, we propose a dual-space knowledge distillation (DSKD) framework that unifies the output spaces of the two models for KD. On the basis of DSKD, we further develop a cross-model attention mechanism, which can automatically align the representations of the two models with different vocabularies. Thus, our framework is not only compatible with various distance functions for KD (e.g., KL divergence) like the current framework, but also supports KD between any two LLMs regardless of their vocabularies. Experiments on task-agnostic instruction-following benchmarks show that DSKD significantly outperforms the current white-box KD framework with various distance functions, and also surpasses existing KD methods for LLMs with different vocabularies.

Dual-Space Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models

Multilingual pre-trained language models (mPLMs) have demonstrated notable effectiveness in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks. Specifically, they can be fine-tuned solely on tasks in the source language and subsequently applied to tasks in the target language. However, for low-resource languages unseen during pre-training, relying solely on zero-shot language transfer often yields sub-optimal results. One common strategy is to continue training PLMs using masked language modeling objectives on the target language. Nonetheless, this approach can be inefficient due to the need to adjust all parameters for language adaptation. In this paper, we propose a more efficient solution: soft-prompt tuning for language adaptation. Our experiments demonstrate that with carefully designed prompts, soft-prompt tuning enables mPLMs to achieve effective zero-shot cross-lingual transfer to downstream tasks in previously unseen languages. Notably, we found that prompt tuning outperforms continuously trained baselines on two text classification benchmarks, encompassing 20 low-resource languages while utilizing a mere 0.28% of the tuned parameters. These results underscore the superior adaptability of mPLMs to previously unseen languages afforded by soft-prompt tuning compared to traditional fine-tuning methods.

Efficient Unseen Language Adaptation for Multilingual Pre-Trained Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown significant potential in assisting medical diagnosis by leveraging extensive biomedical datasets. However, the advancement of medical image understanding and reasoning critically depends on building high-quality visual instruction data, which is costly and labor-intensive to obtain, particularly in the medical domain. To mitigate this data-starving issue, we introduce Self-Training Large Language and Vision Assistant for Medical (STLLaVA-Med). The proposed method is designed to train a policy model (an LVLM) capable of auto-generating medical visual instruction data to improve data efficiency, guided through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Specifically, a more powerful and larger LVLM (e.g., GPT-4o) is involved as a biomedical expert to oversee the DPO fine-tuning process on the auto-generated data, encouraging the policy model to align efficiently with human preferences. We validate the efficacy and data efficiency of STLLaVA-Med across three major medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmarks, demonstrating competitive zero-shot performance with the utilization of only 9% of the medical data.

Self-Training Large Language and Vision Assistant for Medical

Generally, the ${\it decoder-only}$ large language models (LLMs) are adapted to context-aware neural machine translation (NMT) in a concatenating way, where LLMs take the concatenation of the source sentence (i.e., intra-sentence context) and the inter-sentence context as the input, and then to generate the target tokens sequentially. This adaptation strategy, i.e., concatenation mode, considers intra-sentence and inter-sentence contexts with the same priority, despite an apparent difference between the two kinds of contexts. In this paper, we propose an alternative adaptation approach, named ${\bf D}$ecoding-${\bf e}$nhanced ${\bf M}$ulti-phase ${\bf P}$rompt ${\bf T}$uning (DeMPT), to make LLMs discriminately model and utilize the inter- and intra-sentence context and more effectively adapt LLMs to context-aware NMT. First, DeMPT divides the context-aware NMT process into three separate phases. During each phase, different continuous prompts are introduced to make LLMs discriminately model various information. Second, DeMPT employs a heuristic way 
to further discriminately enhance the utilization of the source-side inter- and intra-sentence information at the final decoding phase. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms the concatenation method, and further improves the performance of LLMs in discourse modeling.

DeMPT: Decoding-enhanced Multi-phase Prompt Tuning for Making LLMs Be Better Context-aware Translators

In conversational AI, large-scale models excel in various tasks but struggle with target-driven conversation planning. Current methods, such as chain-of-thought reasoning and tree-search policy learning techniques, either neglect plan rationality or require extensive human simulation procedures. Addressing this, we propose a novel two-stage framework, named EnPL, to improve the LLMs' capability in planning conversations towards designated targets, including (1) distilling natural language plans from target-driven conversation corpus and (2) generating new plans with demonstration-guided in-context learning. Specifically, we first propose a filter approach to distill a high-quality plan dataset, ConvPlan (Resources of this paper can be found at https://github.com/pandazzh2020/ConvPlan). With the aid of corresponding conversational data and support from relevant knowledge bases, we validate the quality and rationality of these plans. Then, these plans are leveraged to help guide LLMs to further plan for new targets. Empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the planning ability of LLMs, especially in target-driven conversations. Furthermore, EnPL is demonstrated to be quite effective in collecting target-driven conversation datasets and enhancing response generation, paving the way for constructing extensive target-driven conversational models.

Thoughts to Target: Enhance Planning for Target-driven Conversation

The abstract inference capability of the Language Model plays a pivotal role in boosting its generalization and reasoning prowess in Natural Language Inference (NLI). Entailment graphs are crafted precisely for this purpose, focusing on learning entailment relations among predicates. Yet, prevailing approaches overlook the *polysemy* and *hierarchical nature of concepts* during entity conceptualization. This oversight disregards how arguments might entail differently across various concept levels, thereby missing potential entailment connections. To tackle this hurdle, we introduce the *concept pyramid* and propose the HiCon-EG (Hierarchical Conceptual Entailment Graph) framework, which organizes arguments hierarchically, delving into entailment relations at diverse concept levels. By learning entailment relationships at different concept levels, the model is guided to better understand concepts so as to improve its abstract inference capabilities. Our method enhances scalability and efficiency in acquiring common-sense knowledge through leveraging statistical language distribution instead of manual labeling, Experimental results show that entailment relations derived from HiCon-EG significantly bolster abstract detection tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/SXUCFN/HiCon-EG

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Next from EMNLP 2024

FlipGuard: Defending Preference Alignment against Update Regression with Constrained Optimization

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Data Augmentation Techniques for Machine Translation of Code-Switched Texts: A Comparative Study