Singapore

In this work, we present a post-processing solution to address the hubness problem in cross-modal retrieval, a phenomenon where a small number of gallery data points are frequently retrieved, resulting in a decline in retrieval performance. We first theoretically demonstrate the necessity of incorporating both the gallery and query data for addressing hubness as hubs always exhibit high similarity with gallery and query data. Second, building on our theoretical results, we propose a novel framework, Dual Bank Normalization (DBNorm). While previous work has attempted to alleviate hubness by only utilizing the query samples, DBNorm leverages two banks constructed from the query and gallery samples to reduce the occurrence of hubs during inference. Next, to complement DBNorm, we introduce two novel methods, dual inverted softmax and dual dynamic inverted softmax, for normalizing similarity based on the two banks. Specifically, our proposed methods reduce the similarity between hubs and queries while improving the similarity between non-hubs and queries. Finally, we present extensive experimental results on diverse language-grounded benchmarks, including text-image, text-video, and text-audio, demonstrating the superior performance of our approaches compared to previous methods in addressing hubness and boosting retrieval performance.

EMNLP 2023

Balance Act: Mitigating Hubness in Cross-Modal Retrieval with Query and Gallery Banks

hubness

cross-modal retrieval

### 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.* 
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to ACL 2025". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. 

ACL 2025

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

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.

Concepts play a central role in many applications. This includes settings where concepts have to be modelled in the absence of sentence context. Previous work has therefore focused on distilling decontextualised concept embeddings from language models. But concepts can be modelled from different perspectives, whereas concept embeddings typically mostly capture taxonomic structure. To address this issue, we propose a strategy for identifying what different concepts, from a potentially large concept vocabulary, have in common with others. We then represent concepts in terms of the properties they share with the other concepts. To demonstrate the practical usefulness of this way of modelling concepts, we consider the task of ultra-fine entity typing, which is a challenging multi-label classification problem. We show that by augmenting the label set with shared properties, we can improve the performance of the state-of-the-art models for this task.

What do Deck Chairs and Sun Hats Have in Common? Uncovering Shared Properties in Large Concept Vocabularies

Recent work has found that few-shot sentence classification based on pre-trained Sentence Encoders (SEs) is efficient, robust, and effective. In this work, we investigate strategies for domain-specialization in the context of few-shot sentence classification with SEs. 
We first establish that unsupervised Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training (DAPT) of a base Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) (i.e., not an SE) substantially improves the accuracy of few-shot sentence classification by up to 8.4 points. However, applying DAPT on SEs, on the one hand, disrupts the effects of their (general-domain) Sentence Embedding Pre-Training (SEPT). On the other hand, applying general-domain SEPT on top of a domain-adapted base PLM (i.e., after DAPT) is effective but inefficient, since the computationally expensive SEPT needs to be executed on top of a DAPT-ed PLM of each domain. As a solution, we propose AdaSent, which decouples SEPT from DAPT by training a SEPT adapter on the base PLM. The adapter can be inserted into DAPT-ed PLMs from any domain. We demonstrate AdaSent's effectiveness in extensive experiments on 17 different few-shot sentence classification datasets. AdaSent matches or surpasses the performance of full SEPT on DAPT-ed PLM, while substantially reducing the training costs. The code for AdaSent is available.

AdaSent: Efficient Domain-Adapted Sentence Embeddings for Few-Shot Classification

Frames of communication are often evoked in multimedia documents. When an author decides to add an image to a text, one or both of the modalities may evoke a communication frame. Moreover, when evoking the frame, the author also conveys her/his stance towards the frame. Until now, determining if the author is in favor of, against or has no stance towards the frame was performed automatically only when processing texts. This is due to the absence of stance annotations on multimedia documents. In this paper we introduce MMVax-Stance, a dataset of 11,300 multimedia documents retrieved from social media, which have stance annotations towards 113 different frames of communication. This dataset allowed us to experiment with several models of multimedia stance detection, which revealed important interactions between texts and images in the inference of stance towards communication frames. When inferring the text/image relations, a set of 46,606 synthetic examples of multimodal documents with known stance was generated. This greatly impacted the quality of identifying multimedia stance, yielding an improvement of 20% in F1-score.

Identification of Multimodal Stance Towards Frames of Communication

Text-video based multimodal event extraction refers to identifying event information from the given text-video pairs. Existing methods predominantly utilize video appearance features (VAF) and text sequence features (TSF) as input information. Some of them employ contrastive learning to align VAF with the event types extracted from TSF. However, they disregard the motion representations in videos and the optimization of contrastive objective could be misguided by the background noise from RGB frames. We observe that the same event triggers correspond to similar motion trajectories, which are hardly affected by the background noise. Moviated by this, we propose a Three Stream Multimodal Event Extraction framework (TSEE) that simultaneously utilizes the features of text sequence and video appearance, as well as the motion representations to enhance the event extraction capacity. Firstly, we extract the optical flow features (OFF) as motion representations from videos to incorporate with VAF and TSF. Then we introduce a Multi-level Event Contrastive Learning module to align the embedding space between OFF and event triggers, as well as between event triggers and types. Finally, a Dual Querying Text module is proposed to enhance the interaction between modalities. Experimental results show that TSEE outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, which demonstrates its superiority.

Three Stream Based Multi-level Event Contrastive Learning for Text-Video Event Extraction

While large pretrained Transformer models have proven highly capable at tackling natural language tasks, handling long sequence inputs still poses a significant challenge. One such task is long input summarization, where inputs are longer than the maximum input context of most models. Through an extensive set of experiments, we investigate what model architectural changes and pretraining paradigms most efficiently adapt a pretrained Transformer for long input summarization. We find that a staggered, block-local Transformer with global encoder tokens strikes a good balance of performance and efficiency, and that an additional pretraining phase on long sequences meaningfully improves downstream summarization performance. Based on our findings, we introduce PEGASUS-X, an extension of the PEGASUS model with additional long input pretraining to handle inputs of up to 16K tokens, which achieves strong performance on long input summarization tasks comparable with much larger models.

Investigating Efficiently Extending Transformers for Long Input Summarization

Despite tremendous improvements in natural language generation, summarization models still suffer from the unfaithfulness issue. Previous work evaluates faithfulness either using models trained on the other tasks or in-domain synthetic data, or prompting a large model such as ChatGPT. This paper proposes to do zero-shot faithfulness evaluation simply with a moderately-sized foundation language model. We introduce a new metric FFLM, which is a combination of probability changes based on the intuition that prefixing a piece of text that is consistent with the output will increase the probability of predicting the output. Experiments show that FFLM performs competitively with or even outperforms ChatGPT on both inconsistency detection and faithfulness rating with 24x fewer parameters. FFLM also achieves improvements over other strong baselines.

Zero-shot Faithfulness Evaluation for Text Summarization with Foundation Language Model

Previous studies observed that finetuned models may be better base models than the vanilla pretrained model. Such a model, finetuned on some source dataset, may provide a better starting point for a new finetuning process on a desired target dataset.
Here, we perform a systematic analysis of this \emph{intertraining} scheme, over a wide range of English classification tasks. Surprisingly, our analysis suggests that the potential intertraining gain can be analyzed \emph{independently} for the target dataset under consideration, and for a base model being considered as a starting point. Hence, a performant model is generally strong, even if its training data was not aligned with the target dataset. Furthermore, we leverage our analysis to propose a practical and efficient approach to determine if and how to select a base model in real-world settings. Last, we release an updating ranking of best models in the HuggingFace hub per architecture.

Where to start? Analyzing the potential value of intermediate models

Group fairness is a central research topic in text classification, where reaching fair treatment between sensitive groups (e.g. women vs. men) remains an open challenge. This paper presents a novel method for mitigating biases in neural text classification, agnostic to the model architecture. Considering the difficulty to distinguish fair from unfair information in a text encoder, we take inspiration from adversarial training to induce Wasserstein independence between representations learned to predict our target label and the ones learned to predict some sensitive attribute. 
Our approach provides two significant advantages. Firstly, it does not require annotations of sensitive attributes in both testing and training data. This is more suitable for real-life scenarios compared to existing methods that require annotations of sensitive attributes at train time. Secondly, our approach exhibits a comparable or better fairness-accuracy trade-off compared to existing methods.

Fair Text Classification with Wasserstein Independence

We introduce an encoding for parsing as sequence labeling that can represent any projective dependency tree as a sequence of 4-bit labels, one per word. The bits in each word's label represent (1) whether it is a right or left dependent, (2) whether it is the outermost (left/right) dependent of its parent, (3) whether it has any left children and (4) whether it has any right children. We show that this provides an injective mapping from trees to labels that can be encoded and decoded in linear time. We then define a 7-bit extension that represents an extra plane of arcs, extending the coverage to almost full non-projectivity (over 99.9% empirical arc coverage). Results on a set of diverse treebanks show that our 7-bit encoding obtains substantial accuracy gains over the previously best-performing sequence labeling encodings.

4 and 7-bit Labeling for Projective and Non-Projective Dependency Trees

Syntax is a latent hierarchical structure which underpins the robust and compositional nature of human language. In this work, we explore the hypothesis that syntactic dependencies can be represented in language model attention distributions and propose a new method to induce these structures theory-agnostically. Instead of modeling syntactic relations as defined by annotation schemata, we model a more general property implicit in the definition of dependency relations, syntactic substitutability. This property captures the fact that words at either end of a dependency can be substituted with words from the same category. Substitutions can be used to generate a set of syntactically invariant sentences whose representations are then used for parsing. We show that increasing the number of substitutions used improves parsing accuracy on natural data. On long-distance subject-verb agreement constructions, our method achieves 79.5% recall compared to 8.9% using a previous method. Our method also provides improvements when transferred to a different parsing setup, demonstrating that it generalizes.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2023

What do Deck Chairs and Sun Hats Have in Common? Uncovering Shared Properties in Large Concept Vocabularies

Similar lecture

Prediction Hubs are Context-Informed Frequent Tokens in LLMs