United Arab Emirates

Powerful generative models have led to recent progress in question generation (QG). However, it is difficult to measure advances in QG research since there are no standardized resources that allow a uniform comparison among approaches. In this paper, we introduce QG-Bench, a multilingual and multidomain benchmark for QG that unifies existing question answering datasets by converting them to a standard QG setting. It includes general-purpose datasets such as SQuAD for English, datasets from ten domains and two styles, as well as datasets in eight different languages. Using QG-Bench as a reference, we perform an extensive analysis of the capabilities of language models for the task. First, we propose robust QG baselines based on fine-tuning generative language models. Then, we complement automatic evaluation based on standard metrics with an extensive manual evaluation, which in turn sheds light on the difficulty of evaluating QG models. Finally, we analyse both the domain adaptability of these models as well as the effectiveness of multilingual models in languages other than English.
QG-Bench is released along with the fine-tuned models presented in the paper (https://github.com/asahi417/lm-question-generation), which are also available as a demo (https://autoqg.net/).

EMNLP 2022

Generative Language Models for Paragraph-Level Question Generation

information-retrieval

question-generation

question-answering

## 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

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.

technical paper

## 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:

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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.

Recent work has introduced an important yet relatively under-explored NLP task called Semantic Overlap Summarization (SOS) that entails generating a summary from multiple alternative narratives which conveys the common information provided by those narratives. Previous work also published a benchmark dataset for this task by collecting 2,925 alternative narrative pairs from the web and manually annotating 411 different reference summaries by engaging human annotators. In this paper, we exclusively focus on the automated evaluation of the SOS task using the benchmark dataset. More specifically, we first use the popular ROUGE metric from text-summarization literature and conduct a systematic study to evaluate the SOS task. Our experiments discover that ROUGE is not suitable for this novel task and therefore, we propose a new sentence-level precision-recall style automated evaluation metric, called SEM-F1 (Semantic F1). It is inspired by the benefits of the sentence-wise annotation technique using overlap labels reported by the previous work. Our experiments show that the proposed SEM-F1 metric yields a higher correlation with human judgment and higher inter-rater agreement compared to the ROUGE metric.

SEM-F1: an Automatic Way for Semantic Evaluation of Multi-Narrative Overlap Summaries at Scale

The task of Cross-document Coreference Resolution has been traditionally formulated as requiring to identify all coreference links across a given set of documents. We propose an appealing, and often more applicable, complementary set up for the task -- Cross-document Coreference Search, focusing in this paper on event coreference. Concretely, given a mention in context of an event of interest, considered as a query, the task is to find all coreferring mentions for the query event in a large document collection. To support research on this task, we create a corresponding dataset, which is derived from Wikipedia while leveraging annotations in the available Wikipedia Event Coreferecene dataset (WEC-Eng). Observing that the coreference search setup is largely analogous to the setting of Open Domain Question Answering, we adapt the prominent Deep Passage Retrieval (DPR) model to our setting, as an appealing baseline. Finally, we present a novel model that integrates a powerful coreference scoring scheme into the DPR architecture, yielding improved performance.

Cross-document Event Coreference Search: Task, Dataset and Modeling

The recent success of large language models for text generation poses a severe threat to academic integrity, as plagiarists can generate realistic paraphrases indistinguishable from original work.
However, the role of large autoregressive models in generating machine-paraphrased plagiarism and their detection is still incipient in the literature.
This work explores T5 and GPT3 for machine-paraphrase generation on scientific articles from arXiv, student theses, and Wikipedia.
We evaluate the detection performance of six automated solutions and one commercial plagiarism detection software and perform a human study with 105 participants regarding their detection performance and the quality of generated examples.
Our results suggest that large language models can rewrite text humans have difficulty identifying as machine-paraphrased (53% mean acc.).
Human experts rate the quality of paraphrases generated by GPT-3 as high as original texts (clarity 4.0/5, fluency 4.2/5, coherence 3.8/5).
The best-performing detection model (GPT-3) achieves 66% F1-score in detecting paraphrases.
We make our code, data, and findings publicly available to facilitate the development of detection solutions.

How Large Language Models are Transforming Machine-Paraphrase Plagiarism

Multi-aspect controllable text generation is a more challenging and practical task than single-aspect control. Existing methods achieve complex multi-aspect control by fusing multiple controllers learned from single-aspect, but suffer from attribute degeneration caused by the mutual interference of these controllers. To address this, we provide observations on attribute fusion from a distributional perspective and propose to directly search for the intersection areas of multiple attribute distributions as their combination for generation. Our method first estimates the attribute space with an autoencoder structure. Afterward, we iteratively approach the intersections by jointly minimizing distances to points representing different attributes. Finally, we map them to attribute-relevant sentences with a prefix-tuning-based decoder. Experiments on the three-aspect control task, including sentiment, topic, and detoxification aspects, reveal that our method outperforms several strong baselines on attribute relevance and text quality and achieves the SOTA. Further analysis also supplies some explanatory support for the effectiveness of our approach.

A Distributional Lens for Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation

We study the text generation task under the approach of pre-trained language models (PLMs). Typically, an auto-regressive (AR) method is adopted for generating texts in a token-by-token manner. 
Despite many advantages of AR generation, it usually suffers from inefficient inference. Therefore, non-autoregressive (NAR) models are proposed to generate all target tokens simultaneously. However, NAR models usually generate texts of lower quality due to the absence of token dependency in the output text. In this paper, we propose ELMER: an efficient and effective PLM for NAR text generation to explicitly model the token dependency during NAR generation. By leveraging the early exit technique, ELMER enables the token generations at different layers, according to their prediction confidence (a more confident token will exit at a lower layer). Besides, we propose a novel pre-training objective, Layer Permutation Language Modeling, to pre-train ELMER by permuting the exit layer for each token in sequences. Experiments on three text generation tasks show that ELMER significantly outperforms NAR models and further narrows the performance gap with AR PLMs (\eg ELMER (29.92) vs BART (30.61) ROUGE-L in XSUM) while achieving over 10 times inference speedup.

ELMER: A Non-Autoregressive Pre-trained Language Model for Efficient and Effective Text Generation

Succinctly summarizing dialogue is a task of growing interest, but inherent challenges, such as insufficient training data and low information density impede our ability to train abstractive models. In this work, we propose a novel curriculum-based prompt learning method with self-training to address these problems. Specifically, prompts are learned using a curriculum learning strategy that gradually increases the degree of prompt perturbation, thereby improving the dialogue understanding and modeling capabilities of our model. Unlabeled dialogue is incorporated by means of self-training so as to reduce the dependency on labeled data. We further investigate topic-aware prompts to better plan for the generation of summaries. Experiments confirm that our model substantially outperforms strong baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art results on the AMI and ICSI datasets. Human evaluations also show the superiority of our model with regard to the summary generation quality.

Curriculum Prompt Learning with Self-Training for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization

Summarization datasets are often assembled either by scraping naturally occurring public-domain summaries---which are nearly always in difficult-to-work-with technical domains---or by using approximate heuristics to extract them from everyday text---which frequently yields unfaithful summaries. In this work, we turn to a slower but more straightforward approach to developing summarization benchmark data: We hire highly-qualified contractors to read stories and write original summaries from scratch. To amortize reading time, we collect five summaries per document, with the first giving an overview and the subsequent four addressing specific questions. We use this protocol to collect SQuALITY, a dataset of question-focused summaries built on the same public-domain short stories as the multiple-choice dataset QuALITY (Pang et al., 2021). Experiments with state-of-the-art summarization systems show that our dataset is challenging and that existing automatic evaluation metrics are weak indicators of quality.

SQuALITY: Building a Long-Document Summarization Dataset the Hard Way

In this study, we propose a Bayesian model that can jointly estimate the number of senses of words and their changes through time.
The model combines a dynamic topic model on Gaussian Markov random fields with a logistic stick-breaking process that realizes Dirichlet process. 
In the experiments, we evaluated the proposed model in terms of interpretability, accuracy in estimating the number of senses, and tracking their changes using both artificial data and real data.
We quantitatively verified that the model behaves as expected through evaluation using artificial data.
Using the CCOHA corpus, we showed that our model outperforms the baseline model and investigated the semantic changes of several well-known target words.

Infinite SCAN: An Infinite Model of Diachronic Semantic Change

State-of-the-art pretrained contextualized models (PCM) eg. BERT use tasks such as WiC and WSD to evaluate their word-in-context representations. This inherently assumes that performance in these tasks reflect how well a model represents the coupled word and context semantics. We question this assumption by presenting the first quantitative analysis on the context-word interaction being tested in major contextual lexical semantic tasks. To achieve this, we run probing baselines on masked input, and propose measures to calculate and visualize the degree of context or word biases in existing datasets. The analysis was performed on both models and humans. Our findings demonstrate that models are usually not being tested for word-in-context semantics in the same way as humans are in these tasks, which helps us better understand the model-human gap. Specifically, to PCMs, most existing datasets fall into the extreme ends (the retrieval-based tasks exhibit strong target word bias while WiC-style tasks and WSD show strong context bias); In comparison, humans are less biased and achieve much better performance when both word and context are available than with masked input. We recommend our framework for understanding and controlling these biases for model interpretation and future task design.

Measuring Context-Word Biases in Lexical Semantic Datasets

With evergrowing digital adoption in the society and increasing demand for businesses to deliver to customers doorstep, the last mile hop of transportation planning poses unique challenges in emerging geographies with unstructured addresses. One of the crucial inputs to facilitate effective planning is the task of geolocating customer addresses. Existing systems operate by aggregating historical delivery locations or by resolving/matching addresses to known buildings and campuses to vend a high-precision geolocation. However, by design they fail to cater to a significant fraction of addresses which are new in the system and have inaccurate or missing building level information. We propose a framework to resolve these addresses (referred to as hard-to-resolve henceforth) to a shallower granularity termed as neighbourhood. Specifically, we propose a weakly supervised deep metric learning model to encode the geospatial semantics in address embeddings. We present empirical evaluation on India (IN) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) hard-to-resolve addresses to show significant improvements in learning geolocations i.e., 22% (IN) & 55% (UAE) reduction in delivery defects (where learnt geocode is >Y meters away from actual location), and 43% (IN) & 90% (UAE) reduction in 50th percentile (p50) distance between learnt and actual delivery locations over the existing production system.

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