United Arab Emirates

Within this study, we evaluated a series of code generation models based on CodeGen and GPTNeo to compare the metric-based performance and human evaluation. For a deeper analysis of human perceiving within the evaluation procedure we&#39;ve implemented a 5-level Likert scale assessment of the model output using a perceiving model based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Through such analysis, we showed an extension of model assessment as well as a deeper understanding of the quality and applicability of generated code for practical question answering. The approach was evaluated with several model settings in order to assess diversity in quality and style of answer. With the TPB-based model, we showed a different level of perceiving the model result, namely personal understanding, agreement level, and readiness to use the particular code. With such analysis, we investigate a series of issues in code generation as natural language generation (NLG) problems observed in a practical context of programming question-answering with code.

EMNLP 2022

Human perceiving behavior modeling in evaluation of code generation models

human perceiving

human evaluation

evaluation metrics

code generation

natural language generation

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Within this study, we evaluated a series of code generation models based on CodeGen and GPTNeo to compare the metric-based performance and human evaluation. For a deeper analysis of human perceiving within the evaluation procedure we've implemented a 5-level Likert scale assessment of the model output using a perceiving model based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Through such analysis, we showed an extension of model assessment as well as a deeper understanding of the quality and applicability of generated code for practical question answering. The approach was evaluated with several model settings in order to assess diversity in quality and style of answer. With the TPB-based model, we showed a different level of perceiving the model result, namely personal understanding, agreement level, and readiness to use the particular code. With such analysis, we investigate a series of issues in code generation as natural language generation (NLG) problems observed in a practical context of programming question-answering with code.

workshop 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:

* 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.

Recent language modeling performance has been greatly improved by the use of external memory. This memory encodes the context so that similar contexts can be recalled during decoding. This similarity depends on how the model learns to encode context, which can be altered to include other attributes, such as style. We construct and evaluate an architecture for this purpose, using corpora annotated for politeness, formality, and toxicity. Through extensive experiments and human evaluation we demonstrate the potential of our method to generate text while controlling style. We find that style-specific datastores improve generation performance, though results vary greatly across styles, and the effect of pretraining data and specific styles should be explored in future work.

Nearest Neighbor Language Models for Stylistic Controllable Generation

This work examines different ways of aggregating scores for error annotation in MT outputs: raw error counts, error counts normalised over total number of words (word percentage'), and error counts normalised over total number of errors (error percentage'). We use each of these three scores to calculate inter-annotator agreement in the form of Krippendorff's $?lpha$ and Pearson's $r$ and compare the obtained numbers, overall and separately for different types of errors. While each score has its advantages depending on the goal of the evaluation, we argue that the best way of estimating inter-annotator agreement using such numbers are raw counts. If the annotation process ensures that the total number of words cannot differ among the annotators (for example, due to adding omission symbols), normalising over number of words will lead to the same conclusions. In contrast, total number of errors is very subjective because different annotators often perceive different amount of errors in the same text, therefore normalising over this number can indicate lower agreements.

On reporting scores and agreement for error annotation tasks

Most commercial conversational AI products in domains spanning e-commerce, health care, finance, and education involve a hierarchy of NLP models that perform a variety of tasks such as classification, entity recognition, question-answering, sentiment detection, semantic text similarity, and so on. Despite our understanding of each of the constituent models, we do not have a clear view as to how these models affect the overall platform metrics. To bridge this gap, we define a metric known as answerability, which penalizes not only irrelevant or incorrect chatbot responses but also unhelpful responses that do not serve the chatbot's purpose despite being correct or relevant. Additionally, we describe a formula-based mathematical framework to relate individual model metrics to the answerability metric. We also describe a modeling approach for predicting a chatbot's answerability to a user question and its corresponding chatbot response.

Answerability: A custom metric for evaluating chatbot performance

Source code summaries are a vital tool for the understanding and maintenance of source code as they can be used to explain code in simple terms. However, source code with missing, incorrect, or outdated summaries is a common occurrence in production code. Automatic source code summarisation seeks to solve these issues by generating up-to-date summaries of source code methods. Recent work in automatically generating source code summaries uses neural networks for generating summaries; commonly Sequence-to-Sequence or Transformer models, pretrained on method-summary pairs. The most common method of evaluating the quality of these summaries is comparing the machine-generated summaries against human-written summaries. Summaries can be evaluated using n-gram-based translation metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, or ROUGE-L. However, these metrics alone can be unreliable and new Natural Language Generation metrics based on large pretrained language models provide an alternative. In this paper, we propose a method of improving the evaluation of a model by improving the preprocessing of the data used to train it, as well as proposing evaluating the model with a metric based off a language model, pretrained on a Natural Language (English) alongside traditional metrics. Our evaluation suggests our model has been improved by cleaning and preprocessing the data used in model training. The addition of a pretrained language model metric alongside traditional metrics shows that both produce results which can be used to evaluate neural source code summarisation.

Improved Evaluation of Automatic Source Code Summarisation

Many domains and tasks in natural language generation (NLG) are inherently 'low-resource', where training data, tools and linguistic analyses are scarce. This poses a particular challenge to researchers and system developers in the era of machine-learning-driven NLG. In this position paper, we initially present the challenges researchers & developers often encounter when dealing with low-resource settings in NLG. We then argue that it is unsustainable to collect large aligned datasets or build large language models from scratch for every possible domain due to cost, labour, and time constraints, so researching and developing methods and resources for low-resource settings is vital. We then discuss current approaches to low-resource NLG, followed by proposed solutions and promising avenues for future work in NLG for low-resource settings.

Most NLG is Low-Resource: here's what we can do about it

The Semantic textual similarity (STS) task is commonly used to evaluate the semantic representations that language models (LMs) learn from texts, under the assumption that good-quality representations will yield accurate similarity estimates. When it comes to estimating the similarity of two utterances in a dialogue, however, the conversational context plays a particularly important role. We argue for the need of benchmarks specifically created using conversational data in order to evaluate conversational LMs in the STS task. We introduce GiCCS, a first conversational STS evaluation benchmark for German. We collected the similarity annotations for GiCCS using best-worst scaling and presenting the target items in context, in order to obtain highly-reliable context-dependent similarity scores. We present benchmarking experiments for evaluating LMs on capturing the similarity of utterances. Results suggest that pretraining LMs on conversational data and providing conversational context can be useful for capturing similarity of utterances in dialogues. GiCCS will be publicly available to encourage benchmarking of conversational LMs.

GiCCS: A German in-Context Conversational Similarity Benchmark

Prefix-tuning is a parameter-efficient and powerful technique for adapting a pre-trained language model to a downstream application. However, it uses the same dataset-level tuned set of parameters for all examples in the dataset. We extend the framework with a dynamic method, Control Prefixes, which allows for the effective inclusion of input-dependent information, thereby demonstrating how prefix-tuning can be used for controlled text generation tasks. The method incorporates attribute-level learnable representations into different layers of a pre-trained Transformer, enabling the generated text to be guided in a particular direction. We provide a systematic evaluation of the technique and apply it to five datasets from the GEM benchmark for natural language generation (NLG). Using only 0.1–2% additional trainable parameters, we show Control Prefixes can even outperform full fine-tuning methods, and present state-of-the-art results on several data-to-text datasets, including WebNLG. We also examine the common case where input-dependent information is unavailable at test time and show Control Prefixes can excel in this setting also.

Control Prefixes for Parameter-Efficient Text Generation

Evaluating open-domain conversation models has been an open challenge due to the open-ended nature of conversations. In addition to static evaluations, recent work has started to explore a variety of per-turn and per-dialog interactive evaluation mechanisms and provide advice on the best setup. In this work, we adopt the interactive evaluation framework and further apply to multiple models with a focus on per-turn evaluation techniques. Apart from the widely used setting where participants select the best response among different candidates at each turn, one more novel per-turn evaluation setting is adopted, where participants can select all appropriate responses with different fallback strategies to continue the conversation when no response is selected. We evaluate these settings based on sensitivity and consistency using four GPT2-based models that differ in model sizes or fine-tuning data. To better generalize to any model groups with no prior assumptions on their rankings and control evaluation costs for all setups, we also propose a methodology to estimate the required sample size given a minimum performance gap of interest before running most experiments. Our comprehensive human evaluation results shed light on how to conduct credible human evaluations of open domain dialog systems using the interactive setup, and suggest additional future directions.

Towards Credible Human Evaluation of Open-Domain Dialog Systems Using Interactive Setup

While automatically computing numerical scores remains the dominant paradigm in NLP system evaluation, error analysis is receiving increasing attention, with numerous error annotation schemes being proposed for automatically generated text. However, there is little agreement about what error annotation schemes should look like, how many different types of errors should be distinguished and at what level of granularity. In this paper, our aim is to map out recent work on annotating errors in automatically generated text, with a particular focus on error taxonomies. We describe our systematic paper selection process, and survey the error annotation schemes reported in the papers, drawing out similarities and differences between them. Finally, we characterise the issues that would make it difficult to move from the current situation to a standardised error taxonomy for annotating errors in automatically generated text.

A Survey of Recent Error Annotation Schemes for Automatically Generated Text

Sharing datasets and benchmarks has been crucial for rapidly improving Natural Language Processing models and systems. Documenting datasets' characteristics (and any modification introduced over time) is equally important to avoid confusion and make comparisons reliable. Here, we describe the case of BigPatent, a dataset for patent summarization that exists in at least two rather different versions under the same name. While previous literature has not clearly distinguished among versions, their differences do not only lay on a surface level but also modify the dataset's core nature and, thus, the complexity of the summarization task. While this paper describes a specific case, we aim to shed light on new challenges that might emerge in resource sharing and advocate for comprehensive documentation of datasets and models.

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Next from EMNLP 2022

Nearest Neighbor Language Models for Stylistic Controllable Generation

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