Singapore

Understanding how and what pre-trained language models (PLMs) learn about language is an open challenge in natural language processing. Previous work has focused on identifying whether they capture semantic and syntactic information, and how the data or the pre-training objective affects their performance. However, to the best of our knowledge, no previous work has specifically examined how information loss in input token characters affects the performance of PLMs. In this study, we address this gap by pre-training language models using small subsets of characters from individual tokens. Surprisingly, we find that pre-training even under extreme settings, i.e. using only one character of each token, the performance retention in standard NLU benchmarks and probing tasks compared to full-token models is high. For instance, a model pre-trained only on single first characters from tokens achieves performance retention of approximately 90% and 77% of the full-token model in SuperGLUE and GLUE tasks, respectively.

EMNLP 2023

Understanding the Role of Input Token Characters in Language Models: How Does Information Loss Affect Performance? | VIDEO

language_modelling

llms

interpretability

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

poster

**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.

NLP systems have shown impressive performance at answering questions by retrieving relevant context. However, with the increasingly large models, it is impossible and often undesirable to constrain models' knowledge or reasoning to only the retrieved context. This leads to a mismatch between the information that \textit{the models} access to derive the answer and the information that is available to \textit{the user} to assess the model predicted answer. In this work, we study how users interact with QA systems in the absence of sufficient information to assess their predictions. Further, we ask whether adding the requisite background helps mitigate users' over-reliance on predictions. Our study reveals that users rely on model predictions even in the absence of sufficient information needed to assess the model's correctness. Providing the relevant background, however, helps users better catch model errors, reducing over-reliance on incorrect predictions. On the flip side, background information also increases users' confidence in their accurate as well as inaccurate judgments. Our work highlights that supporting users' verification of QA predictions is an important, yet challenging, problem.

What Else Do I Need to Know? The Effect of Background Information on Users’ Reliance on QA Systems | VIDEO

A myriad of different Large Language Models (LLMs) face a common challenge in contextually analyzing table question-answering tasks. These challenges are engendered from (1) finite context windows for large tables, (2) multi-faceted discrepancies amongst tokenization patterns against cell boundaries, and (3) various limitations stemming from data confidentiality in the process of using external models such as gpt-35-turbo. We propose a cooperative game dubbed "HiddenTables" as a potential resolution to this challenge. In essence, "HiddenTables" is played between the code-generating LLM "Solver" and the "Oracle" which evaluates the ability of the LLM agents to solve TableQA tasks. This game is based on natural language schemas and importantly, ensures the security of the underlying data. We provide evidential experiments on a diverse set of tables that demonstrate an LLM's collective inability to generalize and perform on complex queries, handle compositional dependencies, and align natural language to programmatic commands when concrete table schemas are provided. Unlike encoder-based models, we have pushed the boundaries of "HiddenTables" to not be limited by the number of rows - therefore we exhibit improved efficiency in prompt and completion tokens. Our infrastructure has spawned a new dataset "PyQTax" that spans across 116,671 question-table-answer triplets and provides additional fine-grained breakdowns and labels for varying question taxonomies. Therefore, in tandem with our academic contributions regarding LLMs' deficiency in TableQA tasks, "HiddenTables" is a tactile manifestation of how LLMs can interact with massive datasets while ensuring data security and minimizing generation costs.

HiddenTables and PyQTax: A Cooperative Game and Dataset For TableQA to Ensure Scale and Data Privacy Across a Myriad of Taxonomies

Research in psychopathology has shown that, at an aggregate level, the patterns of emotional change over time---emotion dynamics---are indicators of one's mental health. One's patterns of emotion change have traditionally been determined through self-reports of emotions; however, there are known issues with accuracy, bias, and convenience. Recent approaches to determining emotion dynamics from one's everyday utterances, addresses many of these concerns, but it is not yet known whether these measures of utterance emotion dynamics (UED) correlate with mental health diagnoses. Here, for the first time, we study the relationship between tweet emotion dynamics and mental health disorders. We find that each of the UED metrics studied varied by the user's self-disclosed diagnosis. For example: average valence was significantly higher (i.e., more positive text) in the control group compared to users with ADHD, MDD, and PTSD. Valence variability was significantly lower in the control group compared to ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder, MDD, PTSD, and OCD but not PPD. Rise and recovery rates of valence also exhibited significant differences from the control. This work provides important early evidence for how linguistic cues pertaining to emotion dynamics can play a crucial role as biosocial markers for mental illnesses and aid in the understanding, diagnosis, and management of mental health disorders.

Language and Mental Health: Measures of Emotion Dynamics from Text as Linguistic Biosocial Markers

Trustworthy answer content is abundant in many high-resource languages and is instantly accessible through question answering systems — yet this content can be hard to access for those that do not speak these languages. The leap forward in cross-lingual modeling quality offered by generative language models offers much promise, yet their raw generations often fall short in factuality. To improve trustworthiness in these systems, a promising direction is to attribute the answer to a retrieved source, possibly in a content-rich language different from the query. Our work is the first to study attribution for cross-lingual question answering. First, we collect data in 5 languages to assess the attribution level of a state-of-the-art cross-lingual QA system. To our surprise, we find that a substantial portion of the answers is not attributable to any retrieved passages (up to 50% of answers exactly matching a gold reference) despite the system being able to attend directly to the retrieved text. Second, to address this poor attribution level, we experiment with a wide range of attribution detection techniques. We find that Natural Language Inference models and PaLM 2 fine-tuned on a very small amount of attribution data can accurately detect attribution. With these models, we improve the attribution level of a cross-lingual QA system. Overall, we show that current academic generative cross-lingual QA systems have substantial shortcomings in attribution and we build tooling to mitigate these issues.

Evaluating and Modeling Attribution for Cross-Lingual Question Answering

Modular neural networks without additional training have recently been shown to surpass end-to-end neural networks on challenging vision–language tasks. The latest such methods simultaneously introduce LLM-based code generation to build programs and a number of skill-specific, task-oriented modules to execute them. In this paper, we focus on ViperGPT and ask where its additional performance comes from and how much is due to the (state-of-art, end-to-end) BLIP-2 model it subsumes vs. additional symbolic components. To do so, we conduct a controlled study (comparing end-to-end, modular, and prompting-based methods across several VQA benchmarks). We find that ViperGPT's reported gains over BLIP-2 can be attributed to its selection of task-specific modules, and when we run ViperGPT using a more task-agnostic selection of modules, these gains go away. ViperGPT retains much of its performance if we make prominent alterations to its selection of modules: e.g. removing or retaining only BLIP-2. We also compare ViperGPT against a prompting-based decomposition strategy and find that, on some benchmarks, modular approaches significantly benefit by representing subtasks with natural language, instead of code. Our code is fully available at https://github.com/brown-palm/visual-question-decomposition.

Analyzing Modular Approaches for Visual Question Decomposition | VIDEO

Decision making via sequence modeling aims to mimic the success of language models, where actions taken by an embodied agent are modeled as tokens to predict. Despite their promising performance, it remains unclear if embodied sequence modeling leads to the emergence of internal representations that represent the environmental state information. A model that lacks abstract state representations would be liable to make decisions based on surface statistics which fail to generalize. We take the BabyAI environment, a grid world in which language-conditioned navigation tasks are performed, and build a sequence modeling Transformer, which takes a language instruction, a sequence of actions, and environmental observations as its inputs. In order to investigate the emergence of abstract state representations, we design a "blindfolded" navigation task, where only the initial environmental layout, the language instruction, and the action sequence to complete the task are available for training. Our probing results show that intermediate environmental layouts can be reasonably reconstructed from the internal activations of a trained model, and that language instructions play a role in the reconstruction accuracy. Our results suggest that many key features of state representations can emerge via embodied sequence modeling, supporting an optimistic outlook for applications of sequence modeling objectives to more complex embodied decision-making domains.

Emergence of Abstract State Representations in Embodied Sequence Modeling

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on corpora disproportionally weighted in favor of Standard American English. As a result, speakers of other dialects experience significantly more failures when interacting with these technologies. In practice, these speakers often accommodate their speech to be better understood. Our work shares the belief that language technologies should be designed to accommodate the diversity in English dialects and not the other way around. However, prior work on dialect struggle with generalizing to evolving and emerging dialects in a scalable manner. To fill this gap, our method, HyperLoRA, leverages expert linguistic knowledge to enable resource-efficient adaptation via hypernetworks. By disentangling dialect-specific and cross-dialectal information, HyperLoRA improves generalization to unseen dialects in a task-agnostic fashion. Not only is HyperLoRA more scalable in the number of parameters, but it also achieves the best or most competitive performance across 5 dialects in a zero-shot setting. In this way, our approach facilitates access to language technology for billions of English dialect speakers who are traditionally underrepresented.

Task-Agnostic Low-Rank Adapters for Unseen English Dialects | VIDEO

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data captured by humans emulating our understanding of the world. However, known as visual illusions, human's perception of reality isn't always faithful to the physical world. This raises a key question: do VLMs have the similar kind of illusions as humans do, or do they faithfully learn to represent reality? To investigate this question, we build a dataset containing five types of visual illusions and formulate four tasks to examine visual illusions in state-of-the-art VLMs. Our findings have shown that although the overall alignment is low, larger models are closer to human perception and more susceptible to visual illusions. Our dataset and initial findings will promote a better understanding of visual illusions in humans and machines and provide a stepping stone for future computational models that can better align humans and machines in perceiving and communicating about the shared visual world. The code and data are available at [github.com/vl-illusion/dataset](https://github.com/vl-illusion/dataset).

Grounding Visual Illusions in Language: Do Vision-Language Models Perceive Illusions Like Humans?

Charts are widely used for data analysis, providing visual representations and insights into complex data. To facilitate chart-based data analysis using natural language, several downstream tasks have been introduced recently such as chart question answering and chart summarization. However, existing methods for these tasks often rely on pretraining on language or vision-language tasks, neglecting the explicit modeling of chart structures (e.g., how chart elements are related to each other). To address this, we first build a large corpus of charts covering diverse topics and visual styles. We then present UniChart, a pretrained model for chart comprehension and reasoning. UniChart encodes the relevant text, data, and visual elements of charts and then uses a chart-grounded text decoder for text generation. We propose several chart-specific pretraining tasks that include: (i) low-level tasks to extract the visual elements (e.g., bars, lines) and data from charts, and (ii) high-level tasks to acquire chart understanding and reasoning skills. Our experiments demonstrate that pretraining UniChart on a large corpus with chart-specific objectives, followed by fine-tuning, yields state-of-the-art performance on four downstream tasks. Moreover, our model exhibits superior generalizability to unseen chart corpus, surpassing previous approaches that lack chart-specific objectives and utilize limited chart resources.

UniChart: A Universal Vision-language Pretrained Model for Chart Comprehension and Reasoning | VIDEO

Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE), which aims to extract relations from a long context, is a critical challenge in achieving fine-grained structural comprehension and generating interpretable document representations.
Inspired by recent advances in in-context learning capabilities emergent from large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, we aim to design an automated annotation method for DocRE with minimum human effort.
Unfortunately, vanilla in-context learning is infeasible for DocRE due to the plenty of predefined fine-grained relation types and the uncontrolled generations of LLMs. To tackle this issue, we propose a method integrating an LLM and a natural language inference (NLI) module to generate relation triples, thereby augmenting document-level relation datasets.
We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by introducing an enhanced dataset known as DocGNRE, which excels in re-annotating numerous long-tail relation types. We are confident that our method holds the potential for broader applications in domain-specific relation type definitions and offers tangible benefits in advancing generalized language semantic comprehension.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2023

What Else Do I Need to Know? The Effect of Background Information on Users’ Reliance on QA Systems | VIDEO

Similar lecture

Tokenization Changes Meaning in Large Language Models: Evidence from Chinese