Singapore

Current research on automatic readability assessment (ARA) has focused on improving the performance of models in high-resource languages such as English. In this work, we introduce and release BasahaCorpus as part of an initiative aimed at expanding available corpora and baseline models for readability assessment in lower resource languages in the Philippines. We compiled a corpus of short fictional narratives written in Hiligaynon, Minasbate, Karay-a, and Rinconada—languages belonging to the Central Philippine family tree subgroup—to train ARA models using surface-level, syllable-pattern, and n-gram overlap features. We also propose a new hierarchical cross-lingual modeling approach that takes advantage of a language&#39;s placement in the family tree to increase the amount of available training data. Our study yields encouraging results that support previous work showcasing the efficacy of cross-lingual models in low-resource settings, as well as similarities in highly informative linguistic features for mutually intelligible languages.

EMNLP 2023

BasahaCorpus: An Expanded Linguistic Resource for Readability Assessment in Central Philippine Languages | VIDEO

philippine languages

text complexity

readability assessment

crosslingual

### 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.
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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.

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ACL 2023

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.

Current research on automatic readability assessment (ARA) has focused on improving the performance of models in high-resource languages such as English. In this work, we introduce and release BasahaCorpus as part of an initiative aimed at expanding available corpora and baseline models for readability assessment in lower resource languages in the Philippines. We compiled a corpus of short fictional narratives written in Hiligaynon, Minasbate, Karay-a, and Rinconada—languages belonging to the Central Philippine family tree subgroup—to train ARA models using surface-level, syllable-pattern, and n-gram overlap features. We also propose a new hierarchical cross-lingual modeling approach that takes advantage of a language's placement in the family tree to increase the amount of available training data. Our study yields encouraging results that support previous work showcasing the efficacy of cross-lingual models in low-resource settings, as well as similarities in highly informative linguistic features for mutually intelligible languages.

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.

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) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

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

The knowledge graph-to-text (KG-to-text) generation task aims to synthesize coherent and engaging sentences that accurately convey the complex information derived from an input knowledge graph. One of the primary challenges in this task is bridging the gap between the diverse structures of the KG and the target text, while preserving the details of the input KG. To address this, we propose a novel approach that efficiently integrates graph structure-aware modules with pre-trained language models. Unlike conventional techniques, which only consider direct connections between first-order neighbors, our method delves deeper by incorporating Relative Distance Encoding as a bias within the graph structure-aware module. This enables our model to better capture the intricate topology information present in the KG. To further elevate the fidelity of the generated text, Planning Selection and Similarity Distinction are introduced. Our approach filters the most relevant linearized sequences by employing a planning scorer, while simultaneously distinguishing similar input KGs through contrastive learning techniques. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model.

Structure-aware Knowledge Graph-to-text Generation with Planning Selection and Similarity Distinction | VIDEO

Aphasia, a language disorder resulting from brain damage, requires accurate identification of specific aphasia types, such as Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia, for effective treatment. However, little attention has been paid to developing methods to detect different types of aphasia. Recognizing the importance of analyzing co-speech gestures for distinguish aphasia types, we propose a multimodal graph neural network for aphasia type detection using speech and corresponding gesture patterns. By learning the correlation between the speech and gesture modalities for each aphasia type, our model can generate textual representations sensitive to gesture information, leading to accurate aphasia type detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results (F1 84.2%). We also show that gesture features outperform acoustic features, highlighting the significance of gesture expression in detecting aphasia types. We provide the codes for reproducibility purposes.

Learning Co-Speech Gesture for Multimodal Aphasia Type Detection

Recent ubiquity and disruptive impacts of large language models (LLMs) have raised concerns about their potential to be misused (*.i.e, generating large-scale harmful and misleading content*). To combat this emerging risk of LLMs, we propose a novel "***Fighting Fire with Fire***" (F3) strategy that harnesses modern LLMs' generative and emergent reasoning capabilities to counter human-written and LLM-generated disinformation. First, we leverage GPT-3.5-turbo to synthesize authentic and deceptive LLM-generated content through paraphrase-based and perturbation-based prefix-style prompts, respectively. Second, we apply zero-shot in-context semantic reasoning techniques with cloze-style prompts to discern genuine from deceptive posts and news articles. In our extensive experiments, we observe GPT-3.5-turbo's zero-shot superiority for both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets, where GPT-3.5-turbo consistently achieved accuracy at 68-72%, unlike the decline observed in previous customized and fine-tuned disinformation detectors. Our codebase and dataset are available at https://github.com/mickeymst/F3.

Fighting Fire with Fire: The Dual Role of LLMs in Crafting and Detecting Elusive Disinformation

With the continuous growth of large language models, the process of fine-tuning these models for new tasks has become increasingly parameter-intensive. Prompt tuning, a method that involves tuning a small set of soft prompts, has emerged as an effective and efficient approach for adapting large pre-trained language models. However, most existing prompt tuning approaches only introduce prompts at the input layer, limiting their performance and leaving large rooms for improvement. In this work, we propose a novel Attention Prompt tuning method, namely APrompt, for efficient adaptation of pre-trained language models. We first demonstrate that existing prompt tuning can be considered as a special case of attention prompt tuning. We then formally introduce APrompt, which incorporates query, key, and value prompts into the attention layer to guide the attention computation during fine-tuning. Experimental results on the SuperGLUE benchmark consistently demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and full fine-tuning method with pre-trained models at different scales. In addition, a comprehensive set of ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the prompt design, as well as the efficiency of our approach.

APrompt: Attention Prompt Tuning for Efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models | VIDEO

The most meaningful connections between people are often fostered through expression of shared vulnerability and emotional experiences in personal narratives. We introduce a new task of identifying similarity in personal stories based on empathic resonance, i.e., the extent to which two people empathize with each others' experiences, as opposed to raw semantic or lexical similarity, as has predominantly been studied in NLP. Using insights from social psychology, we craft a framework that operationalizes empathic similarity in terms of three key features of stories: main events, emotional trajectories, and overall morals or takeaways. We create EmpathicStories, a dataset of 1,500 personal stories annotated with our empathic similarity features, and 2,000 pairs of stories annotated with empathic similarity scores. Using our dataset, we fine-tune a model to compute empathic similarity of story pairs, and show that this outperforms semantic similarity models on automated correlation and retrieval metrics. Through a user study with 150 participants, we also assess the effect our model has on retrieving stories that users empathize with, compared to naive semantic similarity-based retrieval, and find that participants empathized significantly more with stories retrieved by our model. Our work has strong implications for the use of empathy-aware models to foster human connection and empathy between people.

Modeling Empathic Similarity in Personal Narratives

This paper improves contrastive learning for sentence embeddings from two perspectives: handling dropout noise and addressing feature corruption. Specifically, for the first perspective, we identify that the dropout noise from negative pairs affects the model's performance. Therefore, we propose a simple yet effective method to deal with such type of noise. Secondly, we pinpoint the rank bottleneck of current solutions to feature corruption and propose a dimension-wise contrastive learning objective to address this issue. Both proposed methods are generic and can be applied to any contrastive learning based models for sentence embeddings. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate that combining both proposed methods leads to a gain of 1.8 points compared to the strong baseline SimCSE configured with BERT base. Furthermore, applying the proposed method to DiffCSE, another strong contrastive learning based baseline, results in a gain of 1.4 points.

SimCSE++: Improving Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings from Two Perspectives

Existing multi-domain dialog state tracking (DST) models are developed based on multi-domain dialogs, which require significant manual effort to define domain relations and collect data. This process can be challenging and expensive, particularly when numerous domains are involved. In this paper, we propose a divide-and-conquer (DAC) DST paradigm and a multi-domain dialog synthesis framework, which makes building multi-domain DST models from single-domain dialogs possible. The DAC paradigm segments a multi-domain dialog into multiple single-domain dialogs for DST, which makes models generalize better on dialogs involving unseen domain combinations. The multi-domain dialog synthesis framework merges several potentially related single-domain dialogs into one multi-domain dialog and modifies the dialog to simulate domain relations. The synthesized dialogs can help DST models capture the value transfer between domains. Experiments with three representative DST models on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DAC paradigm and data synthesis framework.

Building Multi-domain Dialog State Trackers from Single-domain Dialogs

Text-to-speech(TTS) has undergone remarkable improvements in performance, particularly with the advent of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs). However, the perceived quality of audio depends not solely on its content, pitch, rhythm, and energy, but also on the physical environment.In this work, we propose ViT-TTS, the first visual TTS model with scalable diffusion transformers. ViT-TTS complement the phoneme sequence with the visual information to generate high-perceived audio, opening up new avenues for practical applications of AR and VR to allow a more immersive and realistic audio experience. To mitigate the data scarcity in learning visual acoustic information, we 1) introduce a self-supervised learning framework to enhance both the visual-text encoder and denoiser decoder; 2) leverage the diffusion transformer scalable in terms of parameters and capacity to learn visual scene information. Experimental results demonstrate that ViT-TTS achieves new state-of-the-art results, outperforming cascaded systems and other baselines regardless of the visibility of the scene. With low-resource data (1h, 2h, 5h), ViT-TTS achieves comparative results with rich-resource baselines.~\footnote{Audio samples are available at \url{https://ViT-TTS.github.io/.}}

ViT-TTS: Visual Text-to-Speech with Scalable Diffusion Transformer

Recent advancements in the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have paved the way for a myriad of groundbreaking applications in various fields. However, a significant challenge arises as these models often ``hallucinate'', i.e., fabricate facts without providing users an apparent means to discern the veracity of their statements. Uncertainty estimation (UE) methods are one path to safer, more responsible, and more effective use of LLMs. However, to date, research on UE methods for LLMs has been focused primarily on theoretical rather than engineering contributions. In this work, we tackle this issue by introducing LM-Polygraph, a framework with implementations of a battery of state-of-the-art UE methods for LLMs in text generation tasks, with unified program interfaces in Python.\footnote{\url{http://lm-polygraph.nlpresearch.group}} Additionally, it introduces an extendable benchmark for consistent evaluation of UE techniques by researchers, and a demo web application that enriches the standard chat dialog with confidence scores, empowering end-users to discern unreliable responses.\footnote{\url{http://lm-polygraph-demo.nlpresearch.group}}\footnote{\url{http://lm-polygraph-video.nlpresearch.group}} LM-Polygraph is compatible with the most recent LLMs, including BLOOMz, LLaMA-2, ChatGPT, and GPT-4, and is designed to support future releases of similarly-styled LMs.

LM-Polygraph: Uncertainty Estimation for Language Models | VIDEO

With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) the process known as prompting, which entices the LLM to solve an arbitrary language processing task without the need for finetuning, has risen to prominence.
Finding well-performing prompts, however, is a non-trivial task which requires experimentation in order to arrive at a prompt that solves a specific task.
When a given task does not readily reduce to one that can be easily measured with well established metrics, human evaluation of the results obtained by prompting is often necessary.
In this work we present prompterator, a tool that helps the user interactively iterate over various potential prompts and choose the best performing one based on human feedback.
It is distributed as an open source package with out-of-the-box support for various LLM providers and was designed to be easily extensible.

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