Singapore

In multilingual translation research, the comprehension and utilization of language families are of paramount importance. Nevertheless, clustering languages based solely on their ancestral families can yield suboptimal results due to variations in the datasets employed during the model&#39;s training phase. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce an innovative method that leverages the fisher information matrix (FIM) to cluster language families, anchored on the multilingual translation model&#39;s characteristics. We hypothesize that language pairs with similar effects on model parameters exhibit a considerable degree of linguistic congruence and should thus be grouped cohesively. This concept has led us to define pseudo language families. We provide an in-depth discussion regarding the inception and application of these pseudo language families. Empirical evaluations reveal that employing these pseudo language families enhances performance over conventional language families in adapting a multilingual translation model to unfamiliar language pairs. The proposed methodology may also be extended to scenarios requiring language similarity measurements. The source code and associated scripts can be accessed at https://github.com/ecoli-hit/PseudoFamily.

EMNLP 2023

Clustering Pseudo Language Family in Multilingual Translation Models with Fisher Information Matrix

language clustering

multilingual translation

low-resource

In multilingual translation research, the comprehension and utilization of language families are of paramount importance. Nevertheless, clustering languages based solely on their ancestral families can yield suboptimal results due to variations in the datasets employed during the model's training phase. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce an innovative method that leverages the fisher information matrix (FIM) to cluster language families, anchored on the multilingual translation model's characteristics. We hypothesize that language pairs with similar effects on model parameters exhibit a considerable degree of linguistic congruence and should thus be grouped cohesively. This concept has led us to define pseudo language families. We provide an in-depth discussion regarding the inception and application of these pseudo language families. Empirical evaluations reveal that employing these pseudo language families enhances performance over conventional language families in adapting a multilingual translation model to unfamiliar language pairs. The proposed methodology may also be extended to scenarios requiring language similarity measurements. The source code and associated scripts can be accessed at https://github.com/ecoli-hit/PseudoFamily.

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.

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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.

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HyperNetwork-based Decoupling to Improve Model Generalization for Few-Shot Relation Extraction

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Adaptive End-to-End Metric Learning for Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Slot Filling | VIDEO

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Temporal Logic (TL) can be used to rigorously specify complex high-level specification for systems in many engineering applications. The translation between natural language (NL) and TL has been under-explored due to the lack of dataset and generalizable model across different application domains. In this paper, we propose an accurate and generalizable transformation framework of English instructions from NL to TL, exploring the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) at multiple stages. Our contributions are twofold. First, we develop a framework to create a dataset of NL-TL pairs combining LLMs and human annotation. We publish a dataset with 23K NL-TL pairs. Then, we finetune T5 models on the lifted versions (i.e., the specific Atomic Propositions (AP) are hidden) of the NL and TL. The enhanced generalizability originates from two aspects: 1) Usage of lifted NL-TL characterizes common logical structures, without constraints of specific domains. 2) Application of LLMs in dataset creation largely enhances corpus richness. We test the generalization of trained models on five varied domains. To achieve full NL-TL transformation, we either combine the lifted model with AP recognition task or do the further finetuning on each specific domain. During the further finetuning, our model achieves higher accuracy (> 95%) using only <10% training data, compared with the baseline sequence to sequence (Seq2Seq) model.

NL2TL: Transforming Natural Languages to Temporal Logics using Large Language Models | VIDEO

Given the exponential growth in the number of documents on the web in recent years, there is an increasing demand for accurate models to extract keyphrases from such documents. Keyphrase extraction is the task of automatically identifying representative keyphrases from the source document. Typically, candidate keyphrases exhibit latent hierarchical structures embedded with intricate syntactic and semantic information. Moreover, the relationships between candidate keyphrases and the document also form hierarchical structures. Therefore, it is essential to consider these latent hierarchical structures when extracting keyphrases. However, many recent unsupervised keyphrase extraction models overlook this aspect, resulting in incorrect keyphrase extraction. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a new hyperbolic ranking model (HyperRank). HyperRank is designed to jointly model global and local context information for estimating the importance of each candidate keyphrase within the hyperbolic space, enabling accurate keyphrase extraction. Experimental results demonstrate that HyperRank significantly outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines.

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Planning is an important capability of artificial agents that perform long-horizon tasks in real-world environments. In this work, we explore the use of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to reason about plan sequences from text instructions in embodied visual environments. Prior PLM based approaches for planning either assume observations are available in the form of text by a captioning model, reason about plans from the instruction alone, or incorporate information about the visual environment in limited ways (such as a pre-trained affordance function). In contrast, we show that the PLM can accurately plan even when observations are directly encoded as input prompts for the PLM. We show this simple approach outperforms prior approaches in experiments on the ALFWorld and VirtualHome benchmarks.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Language Models Plan from Pixels | VIDEO

We explore how we can build accurate world models, which are partially specified by language, and how we can plan with them in the face of novelty and uncertainty. We propose the first model-based reinforcement learning approach to tackle the environment Read To Fight Monsters (Zhong et al., 2019), a grounded policy learning problem. In RTFM an agent has to reason over a set of rules and a goal, both described in a language manual, and the observations, while taking into account the uncertainty arising from the stochasticity of the environment, in order to generalize successfully its policy to test episodes. We demonstrate the superior performance and sample efficiency of our model-based approach to the existing model-free SOTA agents in eight variants of RTFM. Furthermore, we show how the agent's plans can be inspected, which represents progress towards more interpretable agents.

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With the rise of social media and online communication, the issue of cyberbullying has gained significant prominence. While extensive research is being conducted to develop more effective models for detecting cyberbullying in monolingual languages, a significant gap exists in understanding code-mixed languages and the need for explainability in this context. To address this gap, we have introduced a novel benchmark dataset named BullyExplain for explainable cyberbullying detection in code-mixed language. In this dataset, each post is meticulously annotated with four labels: bully, sentiment, target, and rationales, indicating the specific phrases responsible for identifying the post as a bully. Our current research presents an innovative unified generative framework, GenEx, which reimagines the multitask problem as a text-to-text generation task. Our proposed approach demonstrates its superiority across various evaluation metrics when applied to the BullyExplain dataset, surpassing other baseline models and current state-of-the-art approaches.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

HyperNetwork-based Decoupling to Improve Model Generalization for Few-Shot Relation Extraction