Canada

We propose a weak supervision pipeline SWEET for extracting person names, which combines simple antirules with multiple large language models fine-tuned on public NER benchmark datasets as well as a domain-specific dataset labelled with ChatGPT. The proposed training process addresses the major challenge of lack of training data in this domain, by effectively aggregating multiple weak signals. The proposed method SWEET outperforms the previous supervised state-of-the-art method for this task by 10% F1 score and better generalizes to the benchmark datasets.

ACL 2023

SWEET: Weakly Supervised Person Name Extraction for Fighting Human Trafficking

llm generation

named entity extraction

combating human trafficking

large language model

**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)<br>
EMNLP 2023 General Chair<br><br><br><br>

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference.<br>
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 ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience.<br>
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**
<br><br><br><br>

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Recent advances in deep learning, and especially the invention of encoder-decoder architectures, has significantly improved the performance of abstractive summarization systems. While the majority of research has focused on written documents, we have observed an increasing interest in the summarization of dialogues and multi-party conversation over the past few years. A system that could reliably transform the audio or transcript of a human conversation into an abridged version that homes in on the most important points of the discussion would be valuable in a wide variety of real-world contexts, from business meetings to medical consultations to customer service calls. This paper focuses on abstractive summarization for multi-party meetings, providing a  survey of the challenges, datasets and systems relevant to this task and a discussion of promising directions for future study.

Abstractive Meeting Summarization: A Survey

Localizing a semantic parser to support new languages requires effective cross-lingual generalization.  Recent work has found success with machine-translation or zero-shot methods although these approaches can struggle to model how native speakers ask questions. We consider how to effectively leverage minimal annotated examples in new languages for few-shot cross-lingual semantic parsing. We introduce a first-order meta-learning algorithm to train a semantic parser with maximal sample efficiency during cross-lingual transfer. Our algorithm uses high-resource languages to train the parser and simultaneously optimizes for cross-lingual generalization for lower-resource languages. Results across six languages on ATIS demonstrate that our combination of generalization steps yields accurate semantic parsers sampling ≤10% of source training data in each new language. Our approach also trains a competitive model on Spider using English with generalization to Chinese similarly sampling ≤10% of training data.

Meta-Learning a Cross-lingual Manifold for Semantic Parsing

How do different tokenizers perform on downstream tasks in scriptio continua languages?: A case study in Japanese

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/13d959f9-994d-411c-9bc3-5c07458a544d" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

How do different tokenizers perform on downstream tasks in scriptio continua languages?: A case study in Japanese

Recent studies in natural language processing (NLP) have focused on modern languages and achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks. Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to ancient texts and related tasks. Classical Chinese first came to Japan approximately 2,000 years ago. It was gradually adapted to a Japanese form called Kanbun-Kundoku (Kanbun) in Japanese reading and translating methods, which has significantly impacted Japanese literature. However, compared to the rich resources of ancient texts in mainland China, Kanbun resources remain scarce in Japan. To solve this problem, we construct the first Classical-Chinese-to-Kanbun dataset in the world. Furthermore, we introduce two tasks, character reordering and machine translation, both of which play a significant role in Kanbun comprehension. We also test the current language models on these tasks and discuss the best evaluation method by comparing the results with human scores. We release our code and dataset on GitHub.

Kanbun-LM: Reading and Translating Classical Chinese in Japanese Methods by Language Models

While embedding-based methods have been dominant in language clustering for multilingual tasks, clustering based on linguistic features has not yet been explored much, as it remains baselines (Tan et al., 2019; Shaffer, 2021). This study investigates whether and how theoretical linguistics improves language clustering for multilingual named entity recognition (NER). We propose two types of language groupings: one based on morpho-syntactic features in a nominal domain and one based on a head parameter. Our NER experiments show that the proposed methods largely outperform a state-of-the-art embedding-based model, suggesting that theoretical linguistics plays a significant role in multilingual learning tasks.

Theoretical Linguistics Rivals Embeddings in Language Clustering for Multilingual Named Entity Recognition

Despite the rapid development of neural-based models, syntax still plays a crucial role in modern natural language processing. However, few studies have incorporated syntactic information into ancient Chinese understanding tasks due to the lack of syntactic annotation. This paper explores the role of syntax in ancient Chinese understanding based on the noisy syntax trees from unsupervised derivation and modern Chinese syntax parsers. On top of that, we propose a novel syntax encoding component -- confidence-based syntax encoding network (cSEN) to alleviate the side effects from the existing noise caused by unsupervised syntax derivation and the incompatibility between ancient and modern Chinese. Experiments on two typical ancient Chinese understanding tasks, ancient poetry theme classification and ancient-modern Chinese translation, demonstrate that syntactic information can effectively enhance the understanding of ancient Chinese over strong baselines, and that the proposed cSEN plays an important role in noisy scenarios.

Enhancing Ancient Chinese Understanding with Derived Noisy Syntax Trees

Although Shapley values have been shown to be highly effective for identifying harmful training instances, dataset size and model complexity constraints limit the ability to apply Shapley-based data valuation to fine-tuning large pre-trained language models. To address this, we propose TS-DShapley, an algorithm that reduces computational cost of Shapley-based data valuation through: 1) an efficient sampling-based method that aggregates Shapley values computed from subsets for valuation of the entire training set, and 2) a value transfer method that leverages value information extracted from a simple classifier trained using representations from the target language model. Our experiments applying TS-DShapley to select data for fine-tuning BERT-based language models on benchmark natural language understanding (NLU) datasets show that TS-DShapley outperforms existing data selection methods. Further, TS-DShapley can filter fine-tuning data to increase language model performance compared to training with the full fine-tuning dataset.

Data Selection for Fine-tuning Large Language Models Using Transferred Shapley Values

Transformer-based language models have been recently showcasing impressive performance on a number of common-sense reasoning tasks such as the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) while continuing to struggle on task instances that are either slightly re-worded or perturbed. In the following paper, we wish to address these issues by re-framing the WSC using a never-ending learning, human-in-the-loop scenario devised specifically for perturbed pronoun co-reference resolution problems. We introduce EvoGrad, an open-source, user-friendly platform for the continual evaluation and development of models, based on iterations of human-adversarial perturbations. Given that common-sense knowledge varies cross-culturally and through time, our platform allows for the communal contribution towards an evolving task that is both inclusive and accessible to wider societies. In addition, we propose a novel mechanism to develop new task instances, and define a new metric to measure model stability on such dynamic tasks, called the Minimum Error Depth. We show that models fine-tuned on a small iteration of EvoGrad have their performance boosted on WSC-based tasks; this indicates a promising synergy between the acquisition of common sense and the never-ending learning paradigm.

EvoGrad: An Online Platform for an Evolving Winograd Schema Challenge using Adversarial Human Perturbations

Scientific research is inherently shaped by its authors' perspectives, influenced by various factors
such as their personality, community, or society. Junior researchers often face challenges in identifying the perspectives reflected in the existing literature and struggle to develop their own viewpoints. In response to this issue, we introduce PersLEARN , a tool designed to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives, starting from a basic seed idea and progressing to a well-articulated framework. By interacting with a prompt-based model, researchers can develop their perspectives explicitly. Our human
study reveals that scientific perspectives developed by students using PersLEARN exhibit a superior level of logical coherence and depth compared to those that did not. Furthermore, our pipeline outperforms baseline approaches across multiple domains of literature from various perspectives. These results suggest that PersLEARN could help foster a greater appreciation of diversity in scientific perspectives as an essential component of research training.

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PersLEARN: Research Training through the Lens of Perspective Cultivation

Pre-trained transformer-based language models are becoming increasingly popular due to their exceptional performance on various benchmarks. However, concerns persist regarding the presence of hidden biases within these models, which can lead to discriminatory outcomes and reinforce harmful stereotypes. To address this issue, we propose Finspector, a human-centered visual inspection tool designed to detect biases in different categories through log-likelihood scores generated by language models. The goal of the tool is to enable researchers to easily identify potential biases using visual analytics, ultimately contributing to a fairer and more just deployment of these models in both academic and industrial settings. Finspector is available at https://github.com/IBM/finspector.

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