Singapore

Prosody---the suprasegmental component of speech, including pitch, loudness, and tempo---carries critical aspects of meaning.
However, the relationship between the information conveyed by prosody vs. by the words themselves remains poorly understood. We use large language models (LLMs) to estimate how much information is redundant between prosody and the words themselves. Using a large spoken corpus of English audiobooks, we extract prosodic features aligned to individual words and test how well they can be predicted from LLM embeddings, compared to non-contextual word embeddings. We find a high degree of redundancy between the information carried by the words and prosodic information across several prosodic features, including intensity, duration, pauses, and pitch contours. 
Furthermore, a word&#39;s prosodic information is redundant with both the word itself and the context preceding as well as following it.
Still, we observe that prosodic features can not be fully predicted from text, suggesting that prosody carries information above and beyond the words. 
Along with this paper, we release a general-purpose data processing pipeline for quantifying the relationship between linguistic information and extra-linguistic features.

EMNLP 2023

Quantifying the redundancy between prosody and text

prosody

information theory

language models

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Prosody---the suprasegmental component of speech, including pitch, loudness, and tempo---carries critical aspects of meaning.
However, the relationship between the information conveyed by prosody vs. by the words themselves remains poorly understood. We use large language models (LLMs) to estimate how much information is redundant between prosody and the words themselves. Using a large spoken corpus of English audiobooks, we extract prosodic features aligned to individual words and test how well they can be predicted from LLM embeddings, compared to non-contextual word embeddings. We find a high degree of redundancy between the information carried by the words and prosodic information across several prosodic features, including intensity, duration, pauses, and pitch contours. 
Furthermore, a word's prosodic information is redundant with both the word itself and the context preceding as well as following it.
Still, we observe that prosodic features can not be fully predicted from text, suggesting that prosody carries information above and beyond the words. 
Along with this paper, we release a general-purpose data processing pipeline for quantifying the relationship between linguistic information and extra-linguistic features.

technical paper

**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.

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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) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Work done to uncover the knowledge encoded within pre-trained language models rely on annotated corpora or human-in-the-loop methods. However, these approaches are limited in terms of scalability and the scope of interpretation. We propose using a large language model, ChatGPT, as an annotator to enable fine-grained interpretation analysis of pre-trained language models. We discover latent concepts within pre-trained language models by applying agglomerative hierarchical clustering over contextualized representations and then annotate these concepts using ChatGPT. Our findings demonstrate that ChatGPT produces accurate and semantically richer annotations compared to human-annotated concepts. Additionally, we showcase how GPT-based annotations empower interpretation analysis methodologies of which we demonstrate two: probing frameworks and neuron interpretation. To facilitate further exploration and experimentation in the field, we make available a substantial ConceptNet dataset (TCN) comprising 39,000 annotated concepts.

Can LLMs Facilitate Interpretation of Pre-trained Language Models?

Understanding sentence meanings and updating information states appropriately across time---what we call ``situational understanding'' (SU)---is a critical ability for human-like AI agents. SU is essential in particular for chat models, such as ChatGPT, to enable consistent, coherent, and effective dialogue between humans and AI. Previous works have identified certain SU limitations in non-chatbot Large Language models (LLMs), but the extent and causes of these limitations are not well understood, and capabilities of current chat-based models in this domain have not been explored. In this work we tackle these questions, proposing a novel synthetic environment for SU testing which allows us to do controlled and systematic testing of SU in chat-oriented models, through assessment of models' ability to track and enumerate environment states. Our environment also allows for close analysis of dynamics of model performance, to better understand underlying causes for performance patterns. We apply our test to ChatGPT, the state-of-the-art chatbot, and find that despite the fundamental simplicity of the task, the model's performance reflects an inability to retain correct environment states across time. Our follow-up analyses suggest that performance degradation is largely because ChatGPT has non-persistent in-context memory (although it can access the full dialogue history) and it is susceptible to hallucinated updates---including updates that artificially inflate accuracies. Our findings suggest overall that ChatGPT is not currently equipped for robust tracking of situation states, and that trust in the impressive dialogue performance of ChatGPT comes with risks. We release the codebase for reproducing our test environment, as well as all prompts and API responses from ChatGPT, at https://github.com/yangalan123/SituationalTesting.

Can You Follow Me? Testing Situational Understanding for ChatGPT

3D visual grounding aims to localize the target object in a 3D point cloud by a free-form language description. Typically, the sentences describing the target object tend to provide information about its relative relation between other objects and its position within the whole scene. In this work, we propose a relation-aware one-stage framework, named 3D Relative Position-aware Network (3DRP-Net), which can effectively capture the relative spatial relationships between objects and enhance object attributes. Specifically, 1) we propose a 3D Relative Position Multi-head Attention (3DRP-MA) module to analyze relative relations from different directions in the context of object pairs, which helps the model to focus on the specific object relations mentioned in the sentence. 2) We designed a soft-labeling strategy to alleviate the spatial ambiguity caused by redundant points, which further stabilizes and enhances the learning process through a constant and discriminative distribution. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmarks (i.e., ScanRefer and Nr3D/Sr3D) demonstrate that our method outperforms all the state-of-the-art methods in general.

3DRP-Net: 3D Relative Position-aware Network for 3D Visual Grounding

The ability to actively ground task instructions from an egocentric view is crucial for AI agents to accomplish tasks or assist humans virtually.
One important step towards this goal is to localize and track key active objects that undergo major state change as a consequence of human actions/interactions to the environment without being told exactly what/where to ground (e.g., localizing and tracking the `sponge` in video from the instruction "Dip the `sponge` into the bucket.").
While existing works approach this problem from a pure vision perspective,
we investigate to which extent the textual modality (i.e., task instructions) and their interaction with visual modality can be beneficial.
Specifically, we propose to improve phrase grounding models' ability on localizing the active objects by:
(1) learning the role of `objects undergoing change` and extracting them accurately from the instructions,
(2) leveraging pre- and post-conditions of the objects during actions,
and (3) recognizing the objects more robustly with descriptional knowledge.
We leverage large language models (LLMs) to extract the aforementioned action-object knowledge,
and design a per-object aggregation masking technique to effectively perform joint inference on object phrases and symbolic knowledge.
We evaluate our framework on Ego4D and Epic-Kitchens datasets.
Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which leads to>54% improvements in all standard metrics on the TREK-150-OPE-Det localization + tracking task, >7% improvements in all standard metrics on the TREK-150-OPE tracking task, and >3% improvements in average precision (AP) on the Ego4D SCOD task.

Localizing Active Objects from Egocentric Vision with Symbolic World Knowledge

Humans possess a remarkable ability to assign novel interpretations to linguistic expressions, enabling them to learn new words and understand community-specific connotations. However, Large Language Models (LLMs) have a knowledge cutoff and are costly to finetune repeatedly. Therefore, it is crucial for LLMs to learn novel interpretations in-context. In this paper, we systematically analyse the ability of LLMs to acquire novel interpretations using in-context learning. To facilitate our study, we introduce MAGNIFICo, an evaluation suite implemented within a text-to-SQL semantic parsing framework that incorporates diverse tokens and prompt settings to simulate real-world complexity. Experimental results on MAGNIFICo demonstrate that LLMs exhibit a surprisingly robust capacity for comprehending novel interpretations from natural language descriptions as well as from discussions within long conversations. Nevertheless, our findings also highlight the need for further improvements, particularly when interpreting unfamiliar words or when composing multiple novel interpretations simultaneously in the same example. Additionally, our analysis uncovers the semantic predispositions in LLMs and reveals the impact of recency bias for information presented in long contexts.

MAGNIFICo: Evaluating the In-Context Learning Ability of Large Language Models to Generalize to Novel Interpretations

Methods for adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks and domains have traditionally assumed white-box access to the model, and work by modifying its parameters.
However, this is incompatible with a recent trend in the field, where the highest quality models are only available as black-boxes through inference APIs. Even when the model weights are available, the computational cost of fine-tuning large LMs can be prohibitive for most practitioners.
In this work, we present a lightweight method for adapting large LMs to new domains and tasks, assuming no access to their weights or intermediate activations. Our approach fine-tunes a small white-box LM and combines it with the large black-box LM at the probability level through a small network, learned on a small validation set. We validate our approach by adapting a large LM (OPT-30B) to several domains and a downstream task (machine translation), observing improved performance in all cases, of up to 9%, while using a domain expert 23x smaller.

CombLM: Adapting Black-Box Language Models through Small Fine-Tuned Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization across various language-related tasks, including search engines. 
However, existing work utilizes the generative ability of LLMs for Information Retrieval (IR) rather than direct passage ranking.
The discrepancy between the pre-training objectives of LLMs and the ranking objective poses another challenge.
In this paper, we first investigate generative LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 for relevance ranking in IR. Surprisingly, our experiments reveal that properly instructed LLMs can deliver competitive, even superior results to state-of-the-art supervised methods on popular IR benchmarks. 
Furthermore, to address concerns about data contamination of LLMs, we collect a new test set called NovelEval, based on the latest knowledge and aiming to verify the model's ability to rank unknown knowledge. 
Finally, to improve efficiency in real-world applications, we delve into the potential for distilling the ranking capabilities of ChatGPT into small specialized models using a permutation distillation scheme.
Our evaluation results turn out that a distilled 440M model outperforms a 3B supervised model on the BEIR benchmark.
The code to reproduce our results is available at www.github.com/sunnweiwei/RankGPT.

Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents | VIDEO

Transformer-based models, even though achieving super-human performance on several downstream tasks, are often regarded as a black box and used as a whole. It is still unclear what mechanisms they have learned, especially their core module: multi-head attention. Inspired by functional specialization in the human brain, which helps to efficiently handle multiple tasks, this work attempts to figure out whether the multi-head attention module will evolve similar function separation under multi-tasking training. If it is, can this mechanism further improve the model performance? To investigate these questions, we introduce an interpreting method to quantify the degree of functional specialization in multi-head attention. We further propose a simple multi-task training method to increase functional specialization and mitigate negative information transfer in multi-task learning. Experimental results on seven pre-trained transformer models have demonstrated that multi-head attention does evolve functional specialization phenomenon after multi-task training which is affected by the similarity of tasks. Moreover, the multi-task training strategy based on functional specialization boosts performance in both multi-task learning and transfer learning without adding any parameters.

Interpreting and Exploiting Functional Specialization in Multi-Head Attention under Multi-task Learning

The shortage of therapists for mental health patients emphasizes the importance of globally accessible dialogue systems alleviating their issues. To have effective interpersonal psychotherapy, these systems must exhibit politeness and empathy when needed. However, these factors may vary as per the user's gender, age, persona, and sentiment. Hence, in order to establish trust and provide a personalized cordial experience, it is essential that generated responses should be tailored to individual profiles and attributes. Focusing on this objective, we propose e-THERAPIST, a novel polite interpersonal psychotherapy dialogue system to address issues like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc. We begin by curating a unique conversational dataset for psychotherapy, called PsyCon. It is annotated at two levels: (i) dialogue-level - including user's profile information (gender, age, persona) and therapist's psychotherapeutic approach; and (ii) utterance-level - encompassing user's sentiment and therapist's politeness, and interpersonal behaviour. Then, we devise a novel reward model to adapt correct polite interpersonal behaviour and use it to train e-THERAPIST on PsyCon employing NLPO loss. Our extensive empirical analysis validates the effectiveness of each component of the proposed e-THERAPIST demonstrating its potential impact in psychotherapy settings.

e-THERAPIST: I suggest you to cultivate a mindset of positivity and nurture uplifting thoughts | VIDEO

Incorporating visual knowledge into text-only dialogue systems has become a potential direction to imitate the way humans think, imagine, and communicate. However, existing multimodal dialogue systems are either confined by the scale and quality of available datasets or the coarse concept of visual knowledge. To address these issues, we provide a new paradigm of constructing multimodal dialogues as well as two datasets extended from text-only dialogues under such paradigm (ReSee-$\texttt{WoW}$, ReSee-$\texttt{DD}$). We propose to explicitly split the visual knowledge into finer granularity ("turn-level" and "entity-level"). To further boost the accuracy and diversity of augmented visual information, we retrieve them from the Internet or a large image dataset. To demonstrate the superiority and universality of the provided visual knowledge, we propose a simple but effective framework ReSee to add visual representation into vanilla dialogue models by modality concatenations. We also conduct extensive experiments and ablations w.r.t. different model configurations and visual knowledge settings. Empirical, encouraging results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of introducing visual knowledge at both entity and turn level but also verify the proposed model ReSee outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on automatic and human evaluations. By leveraging text and vision knowledge, ReSee can produce informative responses with real-world visual concepts. Our code is available at https://github.com/ImKeTT/ReSee.

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