United States

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.

EMNLP 2024

xCOMET-lite: Bridging the Gap Between Efficiency and Quality in Learned MT Evaluation Metrics

artificial moral compass

utilitarian dilemmas

moral alignment

## 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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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.

poster

Data quality is crucial for training accurate, unbiased, and trustworthy machine learning models and their correct evaluation. Recent works, however, have shown that even popular datasets used to train and evaluate state-of-the-art models contain a non-negligible amount of erroneous annotations, bias, or artifacts. There exist best practices and guidelines regarding dataset creation projects. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, no large-scale analysis has been performed as of yet on how quality management is conducted when creating natural language datasets and whether these recommendations are followed. Therefore, we first survey and summarize recommended quality management practices for dataset creation as described in the literature and provide suggestions for applying them. Then, we compile a corpus of 591 scientific publications introducing text datasets and annotate it for quality-related aspects, such as annotator management, agreement, adjudication, or data validation. Using these annotations, we then analyze how quality management is conducted in practice. We find that a majority of the annotated publications apply good or very good quality management. However, we deem the effort of 30% of the works as only subpar. Our analysis also shows common errors, especially when using inter-annotator agreement and computing annotation error rates.

Analyzing Dataset Annotation Quality Management in the Wild

Adapting keyphrase generation models to new domains typically involves few-shot fine-tuning with in-domain labeled data. However, annotating documents with keyphrases is often prohibitively expensive and impractical, requiring expert annotators. This paper presents silk, an unsupervised method designed to address this issue by extracting silver-standard keyphrases from citation contexts to create synthetic labeled data for domain adaptation. Extensive experiments across three distinct domains demonstrate that our method yields high-quality synthetic samples, resulting in significant and consistent improvements in in-domain performance over strong baselines.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Keyphrase Generation using Citation Contexts

In textual backdoor attacks, attackers insert poisoned samples with triggered inputs and target labels into training datasets to manipulate model behavior, threatening the model's security and reliability. Current defense methods can generally be categorized into inference-time and training-time ones. The former often requires a part of clean samples to set detection thresholds, which may be hard to obtain in practical application scenarios, while the latter usually requires an additional retraining or unlearning process to get a clean model, significantly increasing training costs. To avoid these drawbacks, we focus on developing a practical defense method before model training without using any clean samples. Our analysis reveals that with the help of a pre-trained language model (PLM), poisoned samples, different from clean ones, exhibit mismatched relationship and shared characteristics. Based on these observations, we further propose a two-stage poison detection strategy solely leveraging insights from PLM before model training. Extensive experiments confirm our approach's effectiveness, achieving better performance than current leading methods more swiftly. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ascian/PKAD.

PKAD: Pretrained Knowledge is All You Need to Detect and Mitigate Textual Backdoor Attacks

Combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with heuristic search algorithms like A* holds the promise of enhanced LLM reasoning and scalable inference. To accelerate training and reduce computational demands, we investigate the coreset selection problem for the training data of LLM heuristic learning. Few methods to learn the heuristic functions consider the interaction between the search algorithm and the machine learning model. In this work, we empirically disentangle the requirements of A* search algorithm from the requirements of the LLM to generalise on this task. Surprisingly, we find an overlap between their requirements; A* requires more accurate predictions on search nodes near the goal, and LLMs need the same set of nodes for effective generalisation. With these insights, we derive a data-selection distribution for learning LM-based heuristics. On three classical planning domains, maze navigation, Sokoban and sliding tile puzzles, our technique reduces the number of iterations required to find the solutions by up to 15x, with a wall-clock speed-up of search up to 5x. The code has been made available at https://github.com/devaansh100/a_star.

A Training Data Recipe to Accelerate A* Search with Language Models

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in natural language generation (NLG) tasks remains an open challenge, exacerbated by the closed-source nature of the latest large language models (LLMs). This study investigates applying conformal prediction (CP), which can transform any heuristic uncertainty notion into rigorous prediction sets, to black-box LLMs in open-ended NLG tasks. We introduce a novel uncertainty measure based on self-consistency theory, and then develop a conformal uncertainty criterion by integrating the uncertainty condition aligned with correctness into the CP algorithm. Empirical evaluations indicate that our uncertainty measure outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we achieve strict control over the correctness coverage rate utilizing 7 popular LLMs on 4 free-form NLG datasets, spanning general-purpose and medical scenarios. Additionally, the calibrated prediction sets with small size further highlights the efficiency of our method in providing trustworthy guarantees for practical open-ended NLG applications.

ConU: Conformal Uncertainty in Large Language Models with Correctness Coverage Guarantees

Cross-lingual AMR parsing is the task of predicting AMR graphs in a target language when training data is available only in a source language. Due to the small size of AMR training data and evaluation data, cross-lingual AMR parsing has only been explored in a small set of languages such as English, Spanish, German, Chinese, and Italian. Taking inspiration from Langedijk et al. (2022), who apply meta-learning to tackle cross-lingual syntactic parsing, we investigate the use of meta-learning for cross-lingual AMR parsing. We evaluate our models in $k$-shot scenarios (including 0-shot) and assess their effectiveness in Croatian, Farsi, Korean, Chinese, and French. Notably, Korean and Croatian test sets are developed as part of our work, based on the existing The Little Prince English AMR corpus, and made publicly available. We empirically study our method by comparing it to classical joint learning. Our findings suggest that while the meta-learning model performs slightly better in 0-shot evaluation for certain languages, the performance gain is minimal or absent when $k$ is higher than 0.

Should Cross-Lingual AMR Parsing go Meta? An Empirical Assessment of Meta-Learning and Joint Learning AMR Parsing

Yonkoma Manga, characterized by its four-panel structure, presents unique challenges due to its rich contextual information and strong sequential features. To address the limitations of current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in understanding this type of data, we create a novel dataset named YManga from the Internet. After filtering out low-quality content, we collect a dataset of 1,015 yonkoma strips, containing 10,150 human annotations. We then define three challenging tasks for this dataset: panel sequence detection, generation of the author's creative intention, and description generation for masked panels. These tasks progressively introduce the complexity of understanding and utilizing such image-text data. To the best of our knowledge, YManga is the first dataset specifically designed for yonkoma manga strips understanding. Extensive experiments conducted on this dataset reveal significant challenges faced by current multimodal large language models. Our results show a substantial performance gap between models and humans across all three tasks.

Exploring the Capability of Multimodal LLMs with Yonkoma Manga: The YManga Dataset and Its Challenging Tasks

Hypergraphs are characterized by complex topological structure, representing higher-order interactions among multiple entities through hyperedges. Lately, hypergraph-based deep learning methods to learn informative data representations for the problem of node classification on text-attributed hypergraphs have garnered increasing research attention. However, existing methods struggle to simultaneously capture the full extent of hypergraph structural information and the rich linguistic attributes inherent in the nodes attributes, which largely hampers their effectiveness and generalizability. To overcome these challenges, we explore ways to further augment a pretrained BERT model with specialized hypergraph-aware layers for the task of node classification. Such layers introduce higher-order structural inductive bias into the language model, thus improving the model's capacity to harness both higher-order context information from the hypergraph structure and semantic information present in text. In this paper, we propose a new architecture, HyperBERT, a mixed text-hypergraph model which simultaneously models hypergraph relational structure while maintaining the high-quality text encoding capabilities of a pre-trained BERT. Notably, HyperBERT presents results that achieve a new state-of-the-art on five challenging text-attributed hypergraph node classification benchmarks.

HyperBERT: Mixing Hypergraph-Aware Layers with Language Models for Node Classification on Text-Attributed Hypergraphs

We present TuringQ, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in the theory of computation. TuringQ consists of 4,006 undergraduate and graduate-level question-answer pairs, categorized into four difficulty levels and covering seven core theoretical areas. We evaluate several open-source LLMs, as well as GPT-4, using Chain of Thought prompting and expert human assessment. Additionally, we propose an automated LLM-based evaluation system that demonstrates competitive accuracy when compared to human evaluation. Fine-tuning a Llama3-8B model on TuringQ shows measurable improvements in reasoning ability and out-of-domain tasks such as algebra. TuringQ serves as both a benchmark and a resource for enhancing LLM performance in complex computational reasoning tasks. Our analysis offers insights into LLM capabilities and advances in AI comprehension of theoretical computer science.

TuringQ: Benchmarking AI Comprehension in Theory of Computation

Position bias in large language models (LLMs) leads to difficulty in accessing information retrieved from the retriever, thus downgrading the effectiveness of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches in open-question answering. Recent studies reveal that this bias is related to disproportional attention across the context. In this work, we examine how to direct LLMs to allocate more attention towards a selected segment of the context through prompting, aiming to compensate for the shortage of attention. We find that language models do not have relative position awareness of the context but can be directed by promoting instruction with an exact document index. Our analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of position bias in LLMs and provides a pathway to mitigate this bias by instruction, thus benefiting LLMs in locating and utilizing relevant information from retrieved documents in RAG applications. The code and data in our study have been made publicly available.

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