Singapore

Cross-lingual text classification leverages text classifiers trained in a high-resource language to perform text classification in other languages with no or minimal finetuning (zero/few-shots cross-lingual transfer). Nowadays, cross-lingual text classifiers are typically built on large-scale, multilingual language models (LMs) pretrained on a variety of languages of interest. However, the performance of these models vary significantly across languages and classification tasks, suggesting that the superposition of the language modelling and classification tasks is not always effective. For this reason, in this paper we propose revisiting the classic translate-and-test pipeline to neatly separate the translation and classification stages. The proposed approach couples 1) a neural machine translator translating from the targeted language to a high-resource language, with 2) a text classifier trained in the high-resource language, but the neural machine translator generates soft translations to permit end-to-end backpropagation during fine-tuning of the pipeline. Extensive experiments have been carried out over three cross-lingual text classification datasets (XNLI, MLDoc and MultiEURLEX), with the results showing that the proposed approach has significantly improved performance over a competitive baseline.

EMNLP 2023

Translate-and-Test Transfer Learning for Cross-Lingual Text Classification

cross-lingual text classification multilingual

**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.

technical paper

Self-training has proven to be an effective approach for cross-domain tasks, and in this study, we explore its application to cross-domain constituency parsing. Traditional self-training methods rely on limited and potentially low-quality raw corpora. To overcome this limitation, we propose enhancing self-training with the large language model (LLM) to generate domain-specific raw corpora iteratively. For the constituency parsing, we introduce grammar rules that guide the LLM in generating raw corpora and establish criteria for selecting pseudo instances. Our experimental results demonstrate that self-training for constituency parsing, equipped with an LLM, outperforms traditional methods regardless of the LLM's performance. Moreover, the combination of grammar rules and confidence criteria for pseudo-data selection yields the highest performance in the cross-domain constituency parsing.

LLM-enhanced Self-training for Cross-domain Constituency Parsing

While significant progress has been made in natural language processing (NLP), existing methods exhibit limitations in effectively interpreting and processing diverse mathematical modalities. Therefore, we introduce UniMath, a versatile and unified system designed for multimodal mathematical reasoning tasks. Tackling complex problem-solving in arithmetic, geometry, and table-based math, UniMath utilizes a fine-tuned T5 model augmented with a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based image tokenizer. By jointly training and evaluating the model on three diverse datasets - SVAMP, GeoQA, and TableMWP, UniMath achieves state-of-the-art performance. The model's generalization ability is further demonstrated via fine-tuning on two additional datasets, MathQA and Geo-Proving. Through comprehensive evaluations, we showcase that joint training across diverse math tasks improves overall model performance and enhances its ability to generalize across different mathematical reasoning tasks. This pioneering approach provides a blueprint and inspires further efforts on unified mathematical reasoning with deep learning systems.

UniMath: A Foundational and Multimodal Mathematical Reasoner | VIDEO

While research in natural language processing has progressed significantly in creative language generation, the question of whether language models can interpret the intended meaning of creative language largely remains unanswered. Poetry as a creative art form has existed for generations, and summarization of such content requires deciphering the figurative patterns to find out the actual intent and message of the poet. This task can provide the researchers an opportunity to evaluate the creative language interpretation capacity of the language models. Unlike typical text, summarization of poems is a challenging task as poems carry a deeper meaning, which can be easily lost if only the literal meaning is considered. That being said, we propose a new task in the field of natural language understanding called 'Poem Summarization'. As a starting, we propose the first-ever dataset for this task, named 'PoemSum', consisting of 3011 samples of poetry and its corresponding summarized interpretation in the English language. We have benchmarked the performance of different state-of-the-art summarization models and provided observations on their limitations. The dataset and all relevant code used in this work have been made publicly available.

Unveiling the Essence of Poetry: Introducing a Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Poem Summarization

Bilingual Lexicon Induction (BLI) is a core task in multilingual NLP that still, to a large extent, relies on calculating cross-lingual word representations. Inspired by the global paradigm shift in NLP towards Large Language Models (LLMs), we examine the potential of the latest generation of LLMs for the development of bilingual lexicons. We ask the following research question: Is it possible to prompt and fine-tune multilingual LLMs (mLLMs) for BLI, and how does this approach compare against and complement current BLI approaches? To this end, we systematically study 1) zero-shot prompting for unsupervised BLI and 2) few-shot in-context prompting with a set of seed translation pairs, both without any LLM fine-tuning, as well as 3) standard BLI-oriented fine-tuning of smaller LLMs. We experiment with 18 open-source text-to-text mLLMs of different sizes (from 0.3B to 13B parameters) on two standard BLI benchmarks covering a range of typologically diverse languages. Our work is the first to demonstrate strong BLI capabilities of text-to-text mLLMs. The results reveal that few-shot prompting with in-context examples from nearest neighbours achieves the best performance, establishing new state-of-the-art BLI scores for many language pairs. We also conduct a series of in-depth analyses and ablation studies, providing more insights on BLI with (m)LLMs, also along with their limitations.

On Bilingual Lexicon Induction with Large Language Models

The non-humanlike behaviour of contemporary pre-trained language models (PLMs) is a leading cause undermining their trustworthiness. 
A striking phenomenon of such faulty behaviours is the generation of inconsistent predictions, which produces logically contradictory results, such as generating different predictions for texts delivering the same meaning or violating logical properties. Previous studies exploited data augmentation or implemented specialised loss functions to alleviate the issue. However, their usage is limited, because they consume expensive training resources for large-sized PLMs and can only handle a certain consistency type. To this end, we propose a practical approach that alleviates the inconsistent behaviour issue by fundamentally improving PLMs' meaning awareness. Based on the conceptual role theory, our method allows PLMs to capture accurate meaning by learning precise interrelationships between concepts from word-definition pairs in a dictionary. Next, we propose an efficient parameter integration technique that updates only a few additional parameters to combine the learned interrelationship with PLMs' pre-trained knowledge. Our experimental results reveal that the approach can concurrently improve multiple types of consistency, enables efficient knowledge integration, and easily applies to other languages.

Improving Language Models’ Meaning Understanding and Consistency by Learning Conceptual Roles from Dictionary

Significant improvements in end-to-end speech translation (ST) have been achieved through the application of multi-task learning. However, the extent to which auxiliary tasks are highly consistent with the ST task, and how much this approach truly helps, have not been thoroughly studied. In this paper, we investigate the consistency between different tasks, considering different times and modules. We find that the textual encoder primarily facilitates cross-modal conversion, but the presence of noise in speech impedes the consistency between text and speech representations. Furthermore, we propose an improved multi-task learning (IMTL) approach for the ST task, which bridges the modal gap by mitigating the difference in length and representation. We conduct experiments on the MuST-C dataset. The results demonstrate that our method attains state-of-the-art results. Moreover, when additional data is used, we achieve the new SOTA result on MuST-C English to Spanish task with 20.8\% of the training time required by the current SOTA method.

Rethinking and Improving Multi-task Learning for End-to-end Speech Translation | VIDEO

The practice of transferring knowledge from a sophisticated, proprietary large language model (LLM) to a compact, open-source LLM has garnered considerable attention. Previous works have focused on a unidirectional knowledge distillation way by aligning the responses of the student model with those of the teacher model to a set of instructions. Nevertheless, they overlooked the possibility of incorporating any "feedback"--identifying challenging instructions where the student model's performance falls short--to boost the student model's proficiency iteratively. To this end, we propose a novel adversarial distillation framework for a more efficient knowledge transfer. Leveraging the versatile role adaptability of LLMs, we prompt the teacher model to identify "hard" instructions and generate new "hard" instructions for the student model, creating a three-stage adversarial loop of imitation, discrimination, and generation. By applying this adversarial framework, we successfully transfer knowledge from ChatGPT to a student model (named Lion), using a mere 70k training data. Our results show that Lion-13B not only achieves comparable open-ended generation capabilities to ChatGPT but surpasses conventional state-of-the-art (SOTA) instruction-tuned models like Vicuna-13B by 55.4% in challenging zero-shot reasoning benchmarks such as BIG-Bench Hard (BBH) and 16.7% on AGIEval.

Lion: Adversarial Distillation of Proprietary Large Language Models | VIDEO

Recently, there has been a notable surge in the significance of large language models (LLMs) that engage in conversational-style interactions, such as ChatGPT and Claude, as they contribute significantly to the progress of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Typically, these models undergo a two-phase fine-tuning process: instruction fine-tuning (IF) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). These methods aim to align the LLMs to be helpful, honest, and harmless (HHH). However, RLHF, which incorporates independent reward models trained on high-quality human feedback datasets, incurs high costs in terms of hardware resources and human efforts. Therefore, we explore the possibility of aligning LLMs with their own understanding of HHH through IF and in-context learning (ICL). In this study, we propose a novel framework called Self-Criticism, which allows LLMs to align themselves with HHH based on the definition they learned from a large-scale text corpus. We begin by employing IF on a given instruction set and learning HHH discrimination through few-shot ICL. Subsequently, the LLMs evaluate their own generated responses and learn to produce ``better'' responses based on self-judgment. Finally, the model is retrained based on the self-generated responses to distill the whole process. By analyzing our proposed method, we also find interesting connections between Self-Criticism and goal-conditioned reinforcement learning, and pseudo-labeling. Experimental results demonstrate that this method achieves nearly identical performance to RLHF in terms of both human evaluation and evaluation by other LLMs, with only a minimal alignment tax.

Self-Criticism: Aligning Large Language Models with their Understanding of Helpfulness, Honesty, and Harmlessness

With the continuous emergence of Chinese Large Language Models (LLMs), how to evaluate a model's capabilities has become an increasingly significant issue. The absence of a comprehensive Chinese benchmark that thoroughly assesses a model's performance, the unstandardized and incomparable prompting procedure, and the prevalent risk of contamination pose major challenges in the current evaluation of Chinese LLMs. We present CLEVA, a user-friendly platform crafted to holistically evaluate Chinese LLMs. Our platform employs a standardized workflow to assess LLMs' performance across various dimensions, regularly updating a competitive leaderboard. To alleviate contamination, CLEVA curates a significant proportion of new data and develops a sampling strategy that guarantees a unique subset for each leaderboard round. Empowered by an easy-to-use interface that requires just a few mouse clicks and a model API, users can conduct a thorough evaluation with minimal coding. Large-scale experiments featuring 23 Chinese LLMs have validated CLEVA's efficacy.

CLEVA: Chinese Language Models EVAluation Platform

Evidently, words can have multiple senses. For example, the word mess refers to a place to have food or to a confusing situation. How exactly multiple senses emerge is less clear. In this work, we propose and analyze a mathematical model of the evolution of lexical meaning to investigate mechanisms leading to polysemy. 

This model features factors that have been discussed to impact the semantic processing and transmission of words: word frequency, non-conformism, and semantic discriminability. We formally derive conditions under which a sense of a word tends to diversify itself into multiple senses that coexist stably.

The model predicts that diversification is promoted by low frequency, a strong bias for non-conformist usage, and high semantic discriminability. We statistically validate these predictions with historical language data covering semantic developments of a set of English words. Multiple alternative measures are used to operationalize each variable involved, and we confirm the predicted tendencies for twelve combinations of measures.

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