Singapore

Continual Named Entity Recognition (CNER) is a burgeoning area, which involves updating an existing model by incorporating new entity types sequentially. Nevertheless, continual learning approaches are often severely afflicted by catastrophic forgetting. This issue is intensified in CNER due to the consolidation of old entity types from previous steps into the non-entity type at each step, leading to what is known as the semantic shift problem of the non-entity type. In this paper, we introduce a pooled feature distillation loss that skillfully navigates the trade-off between retaining knowledge of old entity types and acquiring new ones, thereby more effectively mitigating the problem of catastrophic forgetting. Additionally, we develop a confidence-based pseudo-labeling for the non-entity type, i.e., predicting entity types using the old model to handle the semantic shift of the non-entity type. Following the pseudo-labeling process, we suggest an adaptive re-weighting type-balanced learning strategy to handle the issue of biased type distribution. We carried out comprehensive experiments on ten CNER settings using three different datasets. The results illustrate that our method significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches, registering an average improvement of 6.3% and 8.0% in Micro and Macro F1 scores, respectively.

EMNLP 2023

Continual Named Entity Recognition without Catastrophic Forgetting | VIDEO

catastrophic forgetting

named entity recognition

continual learning

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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**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

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

Math word problems (MWP) involving advanced operators such as linear equation solver cannot be easily tackled by earlier MWP methods, because the existing generation methods suffer from repeated sub-expression generation and deductive methods are restricted to dealing with binary operations. This paper propose a new multivariate directed acyclic graph (mDAG) as an alternative to the generation methods' binary expression tree or the deductive methods' binary directed acyclic graph. Then to produce the topological ordering of mDAG, we propose a generation-based deductive (GeDe) model, which equips a generation model with a re-encoder to keep the deductive property but avoid the expensive enumeration of the deductive methods. GeDe performs well on math problems with many operators on the widely used benchmarks as well as solving multivariate operators on our own CMWPA benchmark. Our code is available at https://github.com/hyx1999/GeDe

A Generation-based Deductive Method for Math Word Problems

Algorithmic sequence alignment identifies similar segments shared between pairs of documents, and is fundamental to many NLP tasks.
But it is difficult to recognize similarities between distant versions of narratives such as translations and retellings, particularly for summaries and abridgements which are much shorter than the original novels.

We develop a general approach to narrative alignment coupling the Smith-Waterman algorithm from bioinformatics with modern text similarity metrics. We show that the background of alignment scores fits a Gumbel distribution, enabling us to define rigorous p-values on the significance of any alignment. We apply and evaluate our general narrative alignment tool (GNAT) on four distinct problem domains differing greatly in both the relative and absolute length of documents, namely summary-to-book alignment, translated book alignment, short story alignment, and plagiarism detection---demonstrating the power and performance of our methods.

GNAT: A General Narrative Alignment Tool

Novels are often adapted into feature films, but the differences between the two media usually require dropping sections of the source text from the movie script. Here we study this screen adaptation process by constructing narrative alignments using the Smith-Waterman local alignment algorithm coupled with SBERT embedding distance to quantify text similarity between scenes and book units. We use these alignments to perform an automated analysis of 40 adaptations, revealing insights into the screenwriting process concerning (i) faithfulness of adaptation, (ii) importance of dialog, (iii) preservation of narrative order, and (iv) gender representation issues reflective of the Bechdel test.

Analyzing Film Adaptation through Narrative Alignment

We present DALE, a novel and effective generative Data Augmentation framework for low-resource LEgal NLP. DALE addresses the challenges existing frameworks pose in generating effective data augmentations of legal documents - legal language, with its specialized vocabulary and complex semantics, morphology, and syntax, does not benefit from data augmentations that merely rephrase the source sentence. To address this, DALE, built on an Encoder-Decoder Language Model, is pre-trained on a novel unsupervised text denoising objective based on selective masking - our masking strategy exploits the domain-specific language characteristics of templatized legal documents to mask collocated spans of text. Denoising these spans help DALE acquire broad legal knowledge and develop the ability to generate coherent and diverse augmentations with novel contexts. Finally, DALE performs conditional generation to generate synthetic augmentations for low-resource Legal NLP tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DALE on 13 datasets spanning 6 tasks and 4 low-resource settings. DALE outperforms all our baselines, including LLMs, qualitatively and quantitatively, with absolute improvements of 1%-50%.

DALE: Generative Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Legal NLP

While many languages possess processes of joining two or more words to create compound words, previous studies have been typically limited only to languages with excessively productive compound formation (e.g., German, Dutch) and there is no public dataset containing compound and non-compound words across a large number of languages. In this work, we systematically study decompounding, the task of splitting compound words into their constituents, at a wide scale. We first address the data gap by introducing a dataset of 255k compound and non-compound words across 56 diverse languages obtained from Wiktionary. We then use this dataset to evaluate an array of Large Language Models (LLMs) on the decompounding task. We find that LLMs perform poorly, especially on words which are tokenized unfavorably by subword tokenization. We thus introduce a novel methodology to train dedicated models for decompounding. The proposed two-stage procedure relies on a fully self-supervised objective in the first stage, while the second, supervised learning stage optionally fine-tunes the model on the annotated Wiktionary data. Our self-supervised models outperform the prior best unsupervised decompounding models by 13.9% accuracy on average. Our fine-tuned models outperform all prior (language-specific) decompounding tools. Furthermore, we use our models to leverage decompounding during the creation of a subword tokenizer, which we refer to as CompoundPiece. CompoundPiece tokenizes compound words more favorably on average, leading to improved performance on decompounding over an otherwise equivalent model using SentencePiece tokenization.

CompoundPiece: Evaluating and Improving Decompounding Performance of Language Models

This paper explores interactive facial image editing through dialogue and presents the ChatEdit benchmark dataset for evaluating image editing and conversation abilities in this context. ChatEdit is constructed from the CelebA-HQ dataset, incorporating annotated multi-turn dialogues corresponding to user editing requests on the images. The dataset is challenging, as it requires the system to dynamically track and edit images based on user requests, while generating appropriate natural language responses. To address these challenges, we propose a framework comprising a dialogue module for tracking user requests as well as generating responses, and an image editing module for editing images accordingly. Unlike previous approaches, our framework directly tracks the user request of the current turn from the entire dialogue history and edits the initial image instead of manipulating the output from the previous turn, mitigating error accumulation and attribute forgetting issues. Extensive experiments on the ChatEdit dataset demonstrate the superiority of our framework over previous methods and also improvement rooms, encouraging future research. We will release the code and data publicly to facilitate advancements in complex interactive facial image editing.

ChatEdit: Towards Multi-turn Interactive Facial Image Editing via Dialogue

Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is of paramount importance in ensuring accurate tracking of user goals and system actions within task-oriented dialogue systems. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT3 and ChatGPT has sparked considerable interest in assessing their efficacy across diverse applications. In this study, we conduct an initial examination of ChatGPT's capabilities in DST. Our evaluation uncovers the exceptional performance of ChatGPT in this task, offering valuable insights to researchers regarding its capabilities and providing useful directions for designing and enhancing dialogue systems. Despite its impressive performance, ChatGPT has significant limitations including its closed-source nature, request restrictions, raising data privacy concerns, and lacking local deployment capabilities. To address these concerns, we present LDST, an LLM-driven DST framework based on smaller, open-source foundation models. By utilizing a novel domain-slot instruction tuning method, LDST achieves performance on par with ChatGPT. Comprehensive evaluations across three distinct experimental settings, we find that LDST exhibits remarkable performance improvements in both zero-shot and few-shot setting compared to previous SOTA methods. The source code is provided for reproducibility.

Towards LLM-driven Dialogue State Tracking

Dialogue state tracking (DST) plays an important role in task-oriented dialogue systems. However, collecting a large amount of turn-by-turn annotated dialogue data is costly and inefficient. In this paper, we propose a novel turn-level active learning framework for DST to actively select turns in dialogues to annotate. Given the limited labelling budget, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of selective annotation of dialogue turns. Additionally, our approach can effectively achieve comparable DST performance to traditional training approaches with significantly less annotated data, which provides a more efficient way to annotate new dialogue data.

Turn-Level Active Learning for Dialogue State Tracking

In this paper, we aim to improve the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) over structured data in a unified way. Inspired by the studies on tool augmentation for LLMs, we develop an Iterative Reading-then-Reasoning (IRR) framework to solve question answering tasks based on structured data, called StructGPT. In this framework, we construct the specialized interfaces to collect relevant evidence from structured data (i.e., reading), and let LLMs concentrate on the reasoning task based on the collected information (i.e., reasoning). Specially, we propose an invoking-linearization-generation procedure to support LLMs in reasoning on the structured data with the help of the interfaces. By iterating this procedure with provided interfaces, our approach can gradually approach the target answers to a given query. Experiments conducted on three types of structured data show that StructGPT greatly improves the performance of LLMs, under the few-shot and zero-shot settings.

StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data

Automatic program repair (APR) has gained increasing attention as an essential technique in software development to reduce manual debugging efforts and boost developers' productivity. Recent advances in deep learning (DL) based models have demonstrated promising results by learning from large-scale bug-fix examples in a data-driven manner. However, in practical scenarios, software bugs have an imbalanced distribution, and the fixing knowledge learned by APR models often only capture the patterns of frequent error types, making it inapplicable to handle the rare error types. To address this limitation, we investigate a novel task of low-resource APR, and propose Meta-APR, a new meta-learning framework integrated with code pretrained language models to generate fixes for low-resource bugs with limited training samples. Our Meta-APR learns better error-specific knowledge from high-resource bugs through efficient first-order meta-learning optimization, which allows for a faster adaptation to the target low-resource bugs. Besides, while we adopt CodeT5, a pretrained code-aware encoder-decoder Transformer, as the backbone model for Meta-APR, it is a model-agnostic framework that can be integrated with any neural models. Extensive experimental results on three benchmarks in various programming languages verify the superiority of our method over existing DL-based APR approaches.

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A Generation-based Deductive Method for Math Word Problems

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