Croatia

We introduce a new in-context learning paradigm to measure Large Language Models&#39; (LLMs) ability to learn novel words during inference. In particular, we rewrite Winograd-style co-reference resolution problems by replacing the key concept word with a synthetic but plausible word that the model must understand to complete the task. Solving this task requires the model to make use of the dictionary definition of the new word given in the prompt. This benchmark addresses word acquisition, one important aspect of the diachronic degradation known to afflict LLMs. As LLMs are frozen in time at the moment they are trained, they are normally unable to reflect the way language changes over time. We show that the accuracy of LLMs compared to the original Winograd tasks decreases radically in our benchmark, thus identifying a limitation of current models and providing a benchmark to measure future improvements in LLMs ability to do in-context learning.

EACL 2023

WinoDict: Probing language models for in-context word acquisition

word acquisition

in-context learning

dictionary

## 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.

We introduce a new in-context learning paradigm to measure Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to learn novel words during inference. In particular, we rewrite Winograd-style co-reference resolution problems by replacing the key concept word with a synthetic but plausible word that the model must understand to complete the task. Solving this task requires the model to make use of the dictionary definition of the new word given in the prompt. This benchmark addresses word acquisition, one important aspect of the diachronic degradation known to afflict LLMs. As LLMs are frozen in time at the moment they are trained, they are normally unable to reflect the way language changes over time. We show that the accuracy of LLMs compared to the original Winograd tasks decreases radically in our benchmark, thus identifying a limitation of current models and providing a benchmark to measure future improvements in LLMs ability to do in-context learning.

technical paper

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) on domain- specific data have been proven to be effec- tive for in-domain natural language process- ing (NLP) tasks. Our work aimed to develop a language model which can be effective for the NLP tasks with the data from diverse so- cial media platforms. We pretrained a lan- guage model on Twitter and Reddit posts in En- glish consisting of 929M sequence blocks for 112K steps. We benchmarked our model and 3 transformer-based models—BERT, BERTweet, and RoBERTa on 40 social media text classifi- cation tasks. The results showed that although our model did not perform the best on all of the tasks, it outperformed the baseline model— BERT on most of the tasks, which illustrates the effectiveness of our model. Also, our work provides some insights of how to improve the efficiency of training PLMs.

SocBERT: A Pretrained Model for Social Media Text

We propose a novel approach that employs token-level Levenshtein operations to learn a continuous latent space of vector representations to capture the underlying semantic information with regard to the document editing process. Though our model outperforms strong baselines when fine-tuned on edit-centric tasks, it is unclear if these results are due to domain similarities between fine-tuning and pre-training data, suggesting that the benefits of our proposed approach over regular masked language-modelling pre-training are limited.

Edit Aware Representation Learning via Levenshtein Prediction

We introduce simple randomized variants of byte pair encoding (BPE) and explore whether randomizing the selection of merge operations substantially affects a downstream machine translation task.
We focus on translation into morphologically rich languages, hypothesizing that this task may show sensitivity to the method of choosing subwords.
Analysis using a Bayesian linear model indicates that one variant performs nearly indistinguishably compared to standard BPE while the other degrades performance less than we anticipated.
We conclude that although standard BPE is widely used, there exists an interesting universe of potential variations on it worth investigating.

What changes when you randomly choose BPE merge operations? Not much.

In order to reliably process natural language, NLP systems must generalize to the long tail of rare utterances. We propose a method to create challenging benchmarks that require generalizing to the tail of the distribution by re-splitting existing datasets. We create 'Likelihood Splits' where examples that are assigned lower likelihood by a pre-trained language model (LM) are placed in the test set, and more likely examples are in the training set. This simple approach can be customized to construct meaningful train-test splits for a wide range of tasks. Likelihood Splits surface more challenges than random splits: relative error rates of state-of-the-art models increase by 59% for semantic parsing on Spider, 93% for natural language inference on SNLI, and 33% for yes/no question answering on BoolQ, on our splits compared with the corresponding random splits. Moreover, Likelihood Splits create fairer benchmarks than adversarial filtering; when the LM used to create the splits is also employed as the task model, our splits do not unfairly penalize the LM.

Benchmarking Long-tail Generalization with Likelihood Splits

The number of scientific publications in the biomedical domain is continuously increasing with time. An efficient system for indexing these publications is required to make the information accessible according to the user’s information needs. Task 10a of the BioASQ challenge aims to classify PubMed articles according to the MeSH ontology so that new publications can be grouped with similar preexisting publications in the field without the assistance of time-consuming and costly annotations by human annotators. In this work, we use Graph Neural Network (GNN) in the link prediction setting to exploit potential graph-structured information present in the dataset which could otherwise be neglected by transformer-based models. Additionally, we provide error analysis and a plausible reason for the substandard performance achieved by GNN.

Annotating PubMed Abstracts with MeSH Headings using Graph Neural Network

Demographic factors (e.g., gender or age) shape our language. Previous work showed that incorporating demographic factors can consistently improve performance for various NLP tasks with traditional NLP models. In this work, we investigate whether these previous findings still hold with state-of-the-art pretrained Transformer-based language models (PLMs). We use three common specialization methods proven effective for incorporating external knowledge into pretrained Transformers (e.g., domain-specific or geographic knowledge). We adapt the language representations for the demographic dimensions of gender and age, using continuous language modeling and dynamic multi-task learning for adaptation, where we couple language modeling objectives with the prediction of demographic classes. Our results, when employing a multilingual PLM, show substantial gains in task performance across four languages (English, German, French, and Danish), which is consistent with the results of previous work. However, controlling for confounding factors - primarily domain and language proficiency of Transformer-based PLMs -- shows that downstream performance gains from our demographic adaptation do not actually stem from demographic knowledge. Our results indicate that demographic specialization of PLMs, while holding promise for positive societal impact, still represents an unsolved problem for (modern) NLP.

Can Demographic Factors Improve Text Classification? Revisiting Demographic Adaptation in the Age of Transformers

Active learning has been widely used in the task of text classification for its ability to select the most valuable samples to annotate while improving the model performance. However, the efficiency of active learning in multi-label text classification tasks has been under-explored due to the label imbalanceness problem. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study of active learning on multi-label text classification and evaluate the efficiency of five active learning strategies on six multi-label text classification tasks. The experiments show some strategies in the single-label setting especially in imbalanced datasets.

An Empirical Study on Active Learning for Multi-label Text Classification

Low-quality data can cause downstream problems in high-stakes applications. Data-centric approach emphasizes on improving dataset quality to enhance model performance. High-quality datasets are needed for general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) training, as well as for domain-specific models, which are usually small in size as it is costly to engage a large number of domain experts for their creation. Thus, it is vital to ensure high-quality domain-specific training data. In this paper, we propose a framework for enhancing the data quality of original datasets. We applied the proposed framework to four biomedical datasets and showed relative improvement of up to 33%/40% for fine-tuning of retrieval/reader models on the BioASQ dataset when using back translation to enhance the original dataset quality.

A Data-centric Framework for Improving Domain-specific Machine Reading Comprehension Datasets

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the field of abstractive text summarization with focused contributions in relevant model architectures, datasets, and evaluation metrics. Despite notable research advances, previous works have identified certain limitations concerning the quality of datasets and the effectiveness
of evaluation techniques for generated summaries. In this context, we examine these
limitations further with the help of three quality measures, namely, Information Coverage, Entity Hallucination, and Summarization Complexity. As a part of this work, we investigate two widely used datasets (XSUM and CNNDM) and three existing models (BART, PEGASUS, and BRIO) and report our findings. Some key insights are: 1) Cumulative ROUGE score is an inappropriate evaluation measure since few high-scoring samples dominate the overall performance, 2) Existing summarization models have limited capability for information coverage and hallucinate to generate factual information, and 3) Compared to the model-generated summaries, the reference summaries have lowest information coverage and highest entity hallucinations reiterating the need of new and better reference summaries.

Downloads

Next from EACL 2023

SocBERT: A Pretrained Model for Social Media Text

Similar lecture

Rapid Word Learning Through Meta In-Context Learning