Canada

Idioms such as &#39;&#39;call it a day&#39;&#39; and &#39;&#39;piece of cake&#39;&#39;&#39;, are ubiquitous in natural language. How do Transformer language models process idioms? This study examines this question by analysing three models - BERT, Multilingual BERT, and DistilBERT. We compare the embeddings of idiomatic and literal expressions across all layers of the networks at both the sentence and word levels. Additionally, we investigate the attention directed from other sentence tokens towards a word within an idiom as opposed to in a literal context. Results indicate that while the three models exhibit slightly different internal mechanisms, they all represent idioms distinctively compared to literal language, with attention playing a critical role. These findings suggest that idioms are semantically and syntactically idiosyncratic, not only for humans but also for language models.

ACL 2023

How Are Idioms Processed Inside Transformer Language Models?

idiom processing

bertology

language models

## 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.

Idioms such as ''call it a day'' and ''piece of cake''', are ubiquitous in natural language. How do Transformer language models process idioms? This study examines this question by analysing three models - BERT, Multilingual BERT, and DistilBERT. We compare the embeddings of idiomatic and literal expressions across all layers of the networks at both the sentence and word levels. Additionally, we investigate the attention directed from other sentence tokens towards a word within an idiom as opposed to in a literal context. Results indicate that while the three models exhibit slightly different internal mechanisms, they all represent idioms distinctively compared to literal language, with attention playing a critical role. These findings suggest that idioms are semantically and syntactically idiosyncratic, not only for humans but also for language models.

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
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. 
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)**

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.


Words of Estimative Probability (WEP) are phrases used to express the plausibility of a statement. Examples include terms like probably, maybe, likely, doubt, unlikely, and impossible. Surveys have shown that human evaluators tend to agree when assigning numerical probability levels to these WEPs. For instance, the term highly likely equates to a median probability of 0.90±0.08 according to a survey by Fagen-Ulmschneider (2015). In this study, our focus is to gauge the competency of neural language processing models in accurately capturing the consensual probability level associated with each WEP. Our first approach is utilizing the UNLI dataset (Chen et al., 2020), which links premises and hypotheses with their perceived joint probability p. From this, we craft prompts in the form: "[PREMISE]. [WEP], [HYPOTHESIS]." This allows us to evaluate whether language models can predict if the consensual probability level of a WEP aligns closely with p. In our second approach, we develop a dataset based on WEP-focused probabilistic reasoning to assess if language models can logically process WEP compositions. For example, given the prompt "[EVENTA] is likely. [EVENTB] is impossible.", a well-functioning language model should not conclude that [EVENTA&B] is likely. Through our study, we observe that both tasks present challenges to out-of-the-box English language models. However, we also demonstrate that fine-tuning these models can lead to significant and transferable improvements.

Probing neural language models for understanding of words of estimative probability

Prior work has shown that coupling sequential latent variable models with semantic ontological knowledge can improve the representational capabilities of event modeling approaches. In this work, we present a novel, doubly hierarchical, semi-supervised event modeling framework that provides structural hierarchy while
also accounting for ontological hierarchy. Our approach consists of multiple layers of structured latent variables, where each successive layer compresses and abstracts the previous layers. We guide this compression through the injection of structured ontological knowledge that is defined at the type level of events: importantly, our model allows for partial injection of semantic knowledge and it does not depend on observing instances at any particular level of the semantic ontology. Across two
different datasets and four different evaluation metrics, we demonstrate that our approach is able to out-perform the previous state-of-the-art approaches by up to 8.5%, demonstrating the benefits of structured and semantic hierarchical knowledge for event modeling.

Semantically-informed Hierarchical Event Modeling

Even in the era of massive language models, it has been suggested that character-level representations improve the performance of neural models. The state-of-the-art neural semantic parser for Discourse Representation Structures uses character-level representations, improving performance in the four languages (i.e., English, German, Dutch, and Italian) in the Parallel Meaning Bank dataset. However, how and why character-level information improves the parser’s performance remains unclear. This study provides an in-depth analysis of performance changes by order of character sequences. In the experiments, we compare F1-scores by shuffling the order and randomizing character sequences after testing the performance of character-level information. Our results indicate that incorporating character-level information does not improve the performance in English and German. In addition, we find that the parser is not sensitive to correct character order in Dutch. Nevertheless, performance improvements are observed when using character-level information.

Does Character-level Information Always Improve DRS-based Semantic Parsing?

We tackle the problem of monolingual phrase alignment conforming to syntactic structures. The existing method formalises the problem as unordered tree mapping; hence, the alignment quality is easily affected by syntactic ambiguities. We address this problem by expanding the method to align parse forests rather than 1-best trees, where syntactic structures and phrase alignment are simultaneously identified. The proposed method achieves efficient alignment by mapping forests on a packed structure. The experimental results indicated that our method improves the phrase alignment quality of the state-of-the-art method by aligning forests rather than 1-best trees.

Monolingual Phrase Alignment as Parse Forest Mapping

Stance detection deals with identifying an author's stance towards a target.
Most existing stance detection models are limited because they do not consider relevant contextual information which allows for inferring the stance correctly.
Complementary context can be found in knowledge bases but integrating the context into pretrained language models is non-trivial due to the graph structure of standard knowledge bases.
To overcome this, we explore an approach to integrate contextual information as text which allows for integrating contextual information from heterogeneous sources, such as structured knowledge sources and by prompting large language models.
Our approach can outperform competitive baselines on a large and diverse stance detection benchmark in a cross-target setup, i.e. for targets unseen during training.
We demonstrate that it is more robust to noisy context and can regularize for unwanted correlations between labels and target-specific vocabulary.
Finally, it is independent of the pretrained language model in use.

Robust Integration of Contextual Information for Cross-Target Stance Detection

Prior work typically describes out-of-domain (OOD) or out-of-distribution (OODist) samples as those that originate from dataset(s) or source(s) different from the training set but for the same task. When compared to in-domain (ID) samples, the models have been known to usually perform poorer on OOD samples, although this observation is not consistent. Another thread of research has focused on OOD detection, albeit mostly using supervised approaches. In this work, we first consolidate and present a systematic analysis of multiple definitions of OOD and OODist as discussed in prior literature. Then, we analyze the performance of a model under ID and OOD/OODist settings in a principled way. Finally, we seek to identify an unsupervised method for reliably identifying OOD/OODist samples without using a trained model. The results of our extensive evaluation using 12 datasets from 4 different tasks suggest the promising potential of unsupervised metrics in this task.

Estimating Semantic Similarity between In-Domain and Out-of-Domain Samples

We propose using the GPT-3 as a query generator for the backend of CLIP as an implicit word sense disambiguation (WSD) component for the SemEval 2023 shared task: Visual Word Sense Disambiguation (VWSD). We confirmed previous findings --- human-like prompts adapted for WSD with quotes benefit both CLIP and GPT-3, whereas plain phrases or poorly templated prompts yield the worst results.

Query Generation Using GPT-3 for CLIP-Based Word Sense Disambiguation for Image Retrieval

Some applications of artificial intelligence make it desirable that logical formulae be converted computationally to comprehensible natural language sentences. As there are many logical equivalents to a given formula, finding the most suitable equivalent to be used as input for such a "logic-to-text" generation system is a difficult challenge. In this paper, we focus on the role of brevity: Are the shortest formulae the most suitable? We focus on propositional logic (PL), framing formula minimization (i.e., the problem of finding the shortest equivalent of a given formula) as a Quantified Boolean Formulae (QBFs) satisfiability problem. We experiment with several generators and selection strategies to prune the resulting candidates. We conduct exhaustive automatic and human evaluations of the comprehensibility and fluency of the generated texts. The results suggest that while, in many cases, minimization has a positive impact on the quality of the sentences generated, formula minimization may ultimately not be the best strategy.

Is Shortest Always Best? The Role of Brevity in Logic-to-Text Generation

The automatic extraction of hypernym knowledge from large language models like BERT is an open problem, and it is unclear whether methods fail due to a lack of knowledge in the model or shortcomings of the extraction methods. In particular, methods fail on challenging cases which include rare or abstract concepts, and perform inconsistently under paraphrased prompts. In this study, we revisit the long line of work on pattern-based hypernym extraction, and use it as a diagnostic tool to thoroughly examine the hypernomy knowledge encoded in BERT and the limitations of hypernym extraction methods. We propose to construct prompts from established pattern structures: definitional (X is a Y); lexico-syntactic (Y such as X); and their anchored versions (Y such as X or Z). We devise an automatic method for anchor prediction, and compare different patterns in: (i) their effectiveness for hypernym retrieval from BERT across six English data sets; (ii) on challenge sets of rare and abstract concepts; and (iii) on consistency under paraphrasing. We show that anchoring is particularly useful for abstract concepts and in enhancing consistency across paraphrases, demonstrating how established methods in the field can inform prompt engineering.

Seeking Clozure: Robust Hypernym extraction from BERT with Anchored Prompts

In this paper we investigate the application of active learning to semantic role labeling (SRL) using Bayesian Active Learning by Disagreement (BALD). Our new predicate-focused selection method quickly improves efficiency on three different specialised domain corpora. This is encouraging news for researchers wanting to port SRL to domain specific applications. Interestingly, with the large and diverse OntoNotes corpus, the sentence selection approach, that collects a larger number of predicates, taking more time to annotate, fares better than the predicate approach. In this paper, we analyze both the selections made by our two selections methods for the various domains and the differences between these corpora in detail.

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Probing neural language models for understanding of words of estimative probability

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