United Arab Emirates

Existing pre-training methods for extractive Question Answering (QA) generate cloze-like queries different from natural questions in syntax structure, which could overfit pre-trained models to simple keyword matching. In order to address this problem, we propose a novel Momentum Contrastive pRe-training fOr queStion anSwering (MCROSS) method for extractive QA. Specifically, MCROSS introduces a momentum contrastive learning framework to align the answer probability between cloze-like and natural query-passage sample pairs. Hence, the pre-trained models can better transfer the knowledge learned in cloze-like samples to answering natural questions. Experimental results on three benchmarking QA datasets show that our method achieves noticeable improvement compared with all baselines in both supervised and zero-shot scenarios.

EMNLP 2022

Momentum Contrastive Pre-training for Question Answering

contrastive learning

pretraining

language model

question answering

**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 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Current efficient fine-tuning methods
(e.g., adapters, prefix-tuning, etc.) 
have optimized conditional text generation via training a small set of extra parameters of the neural language model, while freezing the rest for efficiency. While showing strong performance on some generation tasks, they don't generalize across all generation tasks. We show that soft-prompt based conditional text generation can be improved with simple and efficient methods that simulate modeling the discourse structure of human written text.
We investigate two design choices: 
First, we apply hierarchical blocking on the prefix parameters to simulate a higher-level discourse structure of human written text. Second, we apply attention sparsity on the prefix parameters at different layers of the network and learn sparse transformations on the softmax-function. We show that structured design of prefix parameters yields more coherent, faithful and relevant generations than the baseline prefix-tuning on all generation tasks.

Discourse-Aware Soft Prompting for Text Generation

Dialogue summarization is abstractive in nature, making it suffer from factual errors. The factual correctness of summaries has the highest priority before practical applications. Many efforts have been made to improve faithfulness in text summarization. However, there is a lack of systematic study on dialogue summarization systems. In this work, we first perform the fine-grained human analysis on the faithfulness of dialogue summaries and observe that over 35% of generated summaries are faithfully inconsistent respective the source dialogues. Furthermore, we present a new model-level faithfulness evaluation method. It examines generation models with multi-choice questions created by rule-based transformations. Experimental results show that our evaluation schema is a strong proxy for the factual correctness of summarization models. The human-annotated faithfulness samples and the evaluation toolkit are released to facilitate future research toward faithful dialogue summarization.

Analyzing and Evaluating Faithfulness in Dialogue Summarization

Commonsense generation aims to generate a realistic sentence describing a daily scene under the given concepts, which is very challenging, since it requires models to have relational reasoning and compositional generalization capabilities. Previous work focuses on retrieving prototype sentences for the provided concepts to assist generation. They first use a sparse retriever to retrieve candidate sentences, then re-rank the candidates with a ranker. However, the candidates returned by their ranker may not be the most relevant sentences, since the ranker treats all candidates equally without considering their relevance to the reference sentences of the given concepts. Another problem is that re-ranking is very expensive, but only using retrievers will seriously degrade the performance of their generation models. To solve these problems, we propose the metric distillation rule to distill knowledge from the metric (e.g., BLEU) to the ranker. We further transfer the critical knowledge summarized by the distilled ranker to the retriever. In this way, the relevance scores of candidate sentences predicted by the ranker and retriever will be more consistent with their quality measured by the metric. Experimental results on the CommonGen benchmark verify the effectiveness of our proposed method: (1) Our generation model with the distilled ranker achieves a new state-of-the-art result. (2) Our generation model with the distilled retriever even surpasses the previous SOTA.

Metric-guided Distillation: Distilling Knowledge from the Metric to Ranker and Retriever for Generative Commonsense Reasoning

To build open-domain chatbots that are able to use diverse communicative skills, we propose a novel framework BotsTalk, where multiple agents grounded to the specific target skills participate in a conversation to automatically annotate multi-skill dialogues. We further present Blended Skill BotsTalk (BSBT), a large-scale multi-skill dialogue dataset comprising 300K conversations. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our dataset can be effective for multi-skill dialogue systems which require an understanding of skill blending as well as skill grounding. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/convei-lab/BotsTalk.

BotsTalk: Machine-sourced Framework for Automatic Curation of Large-scale Multi-skill Dialogue Datasets

BERT has shown a lot of sucess in a wide variety of NLP tasks. But it has a limitation dealing with long inputs due to its attention mechanism. Longformer, ETC and BigBird addressed this issue and effectively solved the quadratic dependency problem.
However we find that these models are not sufficient, and propose LittleBird, a novel model based on BigBird with improved speed and memory footprint while maintaining accuracy.
In particular, we devise a more flexible and efficient position representation method based on Attention with Linear Biases(ALiBi). We also show that replacing the method of global information represented in the BigBird with pack and unpack attention is more effective.
The proposed model can work on long inputs even after being pre-trained on short inputs, and can be trained efficiently reusing existing pre-trained language model for short inputs. This is a significant benefit for low-resource languages where large amounts of long text data are difficult to obtain.
As a result, our experiments show that LittleBird works very well in a variety of languages, achieving high performance in question answering tasks, particularly in KorQuAD2.0, Korean Question Answering Dataset for long paragraphs.

LittleBird: Efficient Faster & Longer Transformer for Question Answering

The task of multi-document summarization (MDS) aims at models that, given multiple documents as input, are able to generate a summary that combines disperse information, originally spread __across__ these documents. Accordingly, it is expected that both reference summaries in MDS datasets, as well as system summaries, would indeed be based on such dispersed information. In this paper, we argue for quantifying and assessing this expectation. To that end, we propose an automated measure for evaluating the degree to which a summary is ``disperse'', in the sense of the number of source documents needed to cover its content. We apply our measure to empirically analyze several popular MDS datasets, with respect to their reference summaries, as well as the output of state-of-the-art systems. Our results show that certain MDS datasets barely require combining information from multiple documents, where a single document often covers the full summary content. Overall, we advocate using our metric for assessing and improving the degree to which summarization datasets require combining multi-document information, and similarly how summarization models actually meet this challenge.

How "Multi" is Multi-Document Summarization?

We investigate the knowledge graph entity typing task which aims at inferring plausible entity types. In this paper, we propose a novel Transformer-based Entity Typing (TET) approach, effectively encoding the content of neighbours of an entity by means of a transformer mechanism. More precisely, TET is composed of three different mechanisms: a local transformer allowing to infer missing entity types by independently encoding the information provided by each of its neighbours; a global transformer aggregating the information of all neighbours of an entity into a single long sequence to reason about more complex entity types; and a context transformer integrating neighbours content in a differentiated way through information exchange between neighbour pairs, while preserving the graph structure. Furthermore, TET uses information about class membership of types to semantically strengthen the representation of an entity. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of TET compared to the state-of-the-art.

Transformer-based Entity Typing in Knowledge Graphs

The ability to extract high-quality translation dictionaries from monolingual word embedding spaces depends critically on the geometric similarity of the spaces---their degree of "isomorphism." We address the root-cause of faulty cross-lingual mapping: that word embedding training resulted in the underlying spaces being non-isomorphic. 
We incorporate global measures of isomorphism directly into the skipgram loss function, successfully increasing the relative isomorphism of trained word embedding spaces and improving their ability to be mapped to a shared cross-lingual space. The result is improved bilingual lexicon induction in general data conditions, under domain mismatch, and with training algorithm dissimilarities. 
We release IsoVec at https://github.com/kellymarchisio/isovec.

IsoVec: Controlling the Relative Isomorphism of Word Embedding Spaces

A key component of fact verification is the evidence retrieval, often from multiple documents. Recent approaches use dense representations and condition the retrieval of each document on the previously retrieved ones. The latter step is performed over all the documents in the collection, requiring storing their dense representations in an index, thus incurring a high memory footprint. An alternative paradigm is retrieve-and-rerank, where documents are retrieved using methods such as BM25, their sentences are reranked, and further documents are retrieved conditioned on these sentences, reducing the memory requirements. However, such approaches can be brittle as they rely on heuristics and assume hyperlinks between documents.

We propose a novel retrieve-and-rerank method for multi-hop retrieval, that consists of a retriever that 
jointly scores documents in the knowledge source and sentences from previously retrieved documents using an autoregressive formulation and is guided by a proof system based on natural logic that dynamically terminates the retrieval process if the evidence is deemed sufficient.

This method exceeds or is on par with the current state-of-the-art on FEVER, HoVer and FEVEROUS-S, 
while using 5 to 10 times less memory than competing systems. Evaluation on an adversarial dataset indicates improved stability of our approach compared to commonly deployed threshold-based methods. Finally, the proof system helps humans predict model decisions correctly more often than using the evidence alone.

Natural Logic-guided Autoregressive Multi-hop Document Retrieval for Fact Verification

Answering questions in narratives about {why events happened often requires commonsense knowledge external to the text. What aspects of this knowledge are available in large language models? What aspects can be made accessible via external commonsense resources? We study these questions in the context of answering questions in the TellMeWhy dataset using COMET as a source of relevant commonsense relations. We analyze the effects of model size (T5 and GPT3) along with methods of injecting knowledge (COMET) into these models. Results show that the largest models, as expected, yield substantial improvements over base models. Injecting external knowledge helps models of various sizes, but the amount of improvement decreases with larger model size. We also find that the format in which knowledge is provided is critical, and that smaller models benefit more from larger amounts of knowledge. Finally, we develop an ontology of knowledge types and analyze the relative coverage of the models across these categories.

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