Singapore

While natural languages differ widely in both canonical word order and word order flexibility, their word orders still follow shared cross-linguistic statistical patterns, often attributed to functional pressures. In the effort to identify these pressures, prior work has compared real and counterfactual word orders. Yet one functional pressure has been overlooked in such investigations: the uniform information density (UID) hypothesis, which holds that information should be spread evenly throughout an utterance. Here, we ask whether a pressure for UID may have influenced word order patterns cross-linguistically. To this end, we use computational models to test whether real orders lead to greater information uniformity than counterfactual orders. In our empirical study of 10 typologically diverse languages, we find that: (i) among SVO languages, real word orders consistently have greater uniformity than reverse word orders, and (ii) only linguistically implausible counterfactual orders consistently exceed the uniformity of real orders. These findings are compatible with a pressure for information uniformity in the development and usage of natural languages.

EMNLP 2023

A Cross-Linguistic Pressure for Uniform Information Density in Word Order

uniform information density

word order

language modeling

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.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) has so far evolved from the traditional flat NER to the overlapped and discontinuous NER. They have mostly been solved separately, with only several exceptions that concurrently tackle three tasks with a single model. Current best-performing method formalizes the unified NER as word-word relation classification, which barely focuses on mention content learning and fails to detect entity mentions comprising a single word. In this paper, we propose a two-stage span-based framework with templates, namely T2-NER, to resolve the unified NER task. The first stage is to extract entity spans, where flat and overlapped entities can be recognized. The second stage is to classify over all entity span pairs, where discontinuous entities can be recognized. Finally, multi-task learning is used to jointly train two stages. To improve the efficiency of span-based model, we design grouped templates and typed templates for two stages to realize batch computations. We also apply an adjacent packing strategy and a latter packing strategy to model discriminative boundary information and learn better span (pair) representation. Moreover, we introduce the syntax information to enhance our span representation. We perform extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets for flat, overlapped, and discontinuous NER, where our model beats all the current competitive baselines, obtaining the best performances of unified NER.

T2-NER: A Two-Stage Span-based Framework For Unified Named Entity Recognition with Templates | VIDEO

A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as its surprisal, i.e. its negative log probability given a context. While evidence supporting the predictions of Surprisal Theory have been replicated widely, most have focused on a very narrow slice of data: native English speakers reading English texts. Indeed, no comprehensive multilingual analysis exists. We address this gap in the current literature by investigating the relationship between surprisal and reading times in eleven different languages, distributed across five language families. Deriving estimates from language models trained on monolingual and multilingual corpora, we test three predictions associated with surprisal theory: (i) whether surprisal is predictive of reading times; (ii) whether expected surprisal, i.e. contextual entropy, is predictive of reading times; (iii) and whether the linking function between surprisal and reading times is linear. We find that all three predictions are borne out crosslinguistically. By focusing on a more diverse set of languages, we argue that these results offer the most robust link to-date between information theory and incremental language processing across languages.

Testing the Predictions of Surprisal Theory in 11 Languages

Within Open Relation Extraction (ORE) tasks, the Zero-shot ORE method is to generalize undefined relations from predefined relations, while the Unsupervised ORE method is to extract undefined relations without the need for annotations. However, despite the possibility of overlap between predefined and undefined relations in the training data, a unified framework for both Zero-shot and Unsupervised ORE has yet to be established. To address this gap, we propose U-CORE: A Unified Deep Cluster-wise Contrastive Framework for both Zero-shot and Unsupervised ORE by leveraging techniques from Contrastive Learning (CL) and Clustering. U-CORE overcomes the limitations of CL-based Zero-shot ORE methods by employing Cluster-wise CL that preserves both local smoothness as well as global semantics. Additionally, we employ a deep-cluster-based updater that optimizes the cluster center, thus enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of the model. To increase the stability of the model, we adopt Adaptive Self-paced Learning that effectively addresses the data-shifting problems. Experimental results on three well-known datasets demonstrate that U-CORE significantly improves upon existing methods by showing an average improvement of 7.35% ARI on Zero-shot ORE tasks and 15.24% ARI on Unsupervised ORE tasks.

U-CORE: A Unified Deep Cluster-wise Contrastive Framework for Open Relation Extraction

Italy is characterized by a one-of-a-kind linguistic diversity landscape in Europe, which implicitly encodes local knowledge, cultural traditions, artistic expressions and history of its speakers. However, most local languages and dialects in Italy are at risk of disappearing within few generations. The NLP community has recently begun to engage with endangered languages, including those of Italy. Yet, most efforts assume that these varieties are under-resourced language monoliths with an established written form and homogeneous functions and needs, and thus highly interchangeable with each other and with high-resource, standardized languages. In this paper, we introduce the linguistic context of Italy and challenge the default machine-centric assumptions of NLP for Italy's language varieties. We advocate for a shift in the paradigm from machine-centric to speaker-centric NLP, and provide recommendations and opportunities for work that prioritizes languages and their speakers over technological advances. To facilitate the process, we finally propose building a local community towards responsible, participatory efforts aimed at supporting vitality of languages and dialects of Italy.

Language Varieties of Italy: Technology Challenges and Opportunities

Pretrained autoregressive language models (LMs) can successfully solve many NLP tasks via zero-shot and few-shot learning. This paper introduces mGPT, a multilingual variant of GPT-3, pretrained on 61 languages from linguistically diverse 25 language families using Wikipedia and C4 Corpus. We detail the design and pretraining procedure. The models undergo an intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation: language modeling in all languages, downstream evaluation on cross-lingual NLU datasets and benchmarks in 33 languages, and world knowledge probing in 23 languages. The in-context learning abilities are on par with the contemporaneous LMs while covering a larger amount of languages, including underrepresented and low-resource languages of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the small peoples in Russia. The source code, pretraining data, and models are either publicly available or will be released upon acceptance.

mGPT: Few-Shot Learners Go Multilingual

Natural language generation has witnessed significant advancements due to the training of large language models on vast internet-scale datasets. Despite these advancements, there exists a critical challenge: these models can inadvertently generate content that is toxic, inaccurate, and unhelpful, and existing automatic evaluation metrics often fall short of identifying these shortcomings.As models become more capable, human feedback is an invaluable signal for evaluating and improving models. This survey aims to provide an overview of recent research that has leveraged human feedback to improve natural language generation. First, we introduce a taxonomy distilled from existing research to categorize and organize the varied forms of feedback.\nNext, we discuss how feedback can be described by its format and objective, and cover the two approaches proposed to use feedback (either for training or decoding): directly using feedback or training feedback models. We also discuss existing datasets for human-feedback data collection, and concerns surrounding feedback collection. Finally, we provide an overview of the nascent field of AI feedback, which uses large language models to make judgments based on a set of principles and minimize the need for human intervention. We also release a website of this survey at feedback-gap-survey.info

Bridging the Gap: A Survey on Integrating (Human) Feedback for Natural Language Generation | VIDEO

Just as computational simulations of atoms, molecules and cells have shaped the way we study the sciences, true-to-life simulations of human-like agents can be valuable tools for studying human behavior. We propose Humanoid Agents, a system that guides Generative Agents to behave more like humans by introducing three elements of System 1 processing: Basic needs (e.g. hunger, health and energy), Emotion and Closeness in Relationships. Humanoid Agents are able to use these dynamic elements to adapt their daily activities and conversations with other agents, as supported with empirical experiments. Our system is designed to be extensible to various settings, three of which we demonstrate, as well as to other elements influencing human behavior (e.g. empathy, moral values and cultural background). Our platform also includes a Unity WebGL game interface for visualization and an interactive analytics dashboard to show agent statuses over time. Our platform is available on https://www.humanoidagents.com/ and code is on https://github.com/HumanoidAgents/HumanoidAgents

Humanoid Agents: Platform for Simulating Human-like Generative Agents

Various NLP tasks require a complex hierarchical structure over nodes, where each node is a cluster of items. Examples include generating entailment graphs, hierarchical cross-document coreference resolution, annotating event and subevent relations, etc. To enable efficient annotation of such hierarchical structures, we release CHAMP, an open source tool allowing to incrementally construct both clusters and hierarchy simultaneously over any type of texts. This incremental approach significantly reduces annotation time compared to the common pairwise annotation approach and also guarantees maintaining transitivity at the cluster and hierarchy levels. Furthermore, CHAMP includes a consolidation mode, where an adjudicator can easily compare multiple cluster hierarchy annotations and resolve disagreements.

CHAMP: Efficient Annotation and Consolidation of Cluster Hierarchies

We introduce WeatherSearch, an integrated search system deployed at the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). WeatherSearch enables users to retrieve all the relevant data for weather forecasting from a massive weather database with simple natural language queries. We carefully design and conduct multiple expert surveys and interviews for template creation and apply data augmentation techniques including template filling to collect 4 million data points with minimal human labors. We then finetune mT5 on the collected dataset and achieve an average MRR of 0.66 and an average Recall of 0.82. We also discuss weather-data-specific characteristics that should be taken into account for creating such a system. We hope our paper serves as a simple and effective guideline for those designing similar systems in other regions of the world.

An Integrated Search System for Korea Weather Data

As pretrained transformer language models continue to achieve state-of-the-art performance, the Natural Language Processing community has pushed for advances in model compression and efficient attention mechanisms to address high computational requirements and limited input sequence length. Despite these separate efforts, no investigation has been done into the intersection of these two fields. In this work, we provide an evaluation of model compression via knowledge distillation on efficient attention transformers. We provide cost-performance trade-offs for the compression of state-of-the-art efficient attention architectures and the gains made in performance in comparison to their full attention counterparts. Furthermore, we introduce a new long-context Named Entity Recognition dataset, GONERD, to train and test the performance of NER models on long sequences. We find that distilled efficient attention transformers can preserve a significant amount of original model performance, preserving up to \textbf{98.6\%} across short-context tasks (GLUE, SQUAD, CoNLL-2003), up to \textbf{94.6\%} across long-context Question-and-Answering tasks (HotpotQA, TriviaQA), and up to \textbf{98.8\%} on long-context Named Entity Recognition (GONERD), while decreasing inference times by up to \textbf{57.8\%}. We find that, for most models on most tasks, performing knowledge distillation is an effective method to yield high-performing efficient attention models with low costs.

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T2-NER: A Two-Stage Span-based Framework For Unified Named Entity Recognition with Templates | VIDEO

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T2-NER: A Two-Stage Span-based Framework For Unified Named Entity Recognition with Templates | VIDEO

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