Singapore

We present symbol tuning - finetuning language models on in-context input-label pairs where natural language labels (e.g., &quot;positive/negative sentiment&quot;) are replaced with arbitrary symbols (e.g., &quot;foo/bar&quot;). Symbol tuning leverages the intuition that when a model cannot use instructions or natural language labels to figure out a task, it must instead do so by learning the input-label mappings.

We experiment with symbol tuning across PaLM models up to 540B parameters and observe benefits across various settings. First, symbol tuning boosts performance on unseen in-context learning tasks and is much more robust to underspecified prompts, such as those without instructions or without natural language labels. Second, symbol-tuned models are much stronger at algorithmic reasoning tasks, with up to 18.2% better performance on the List Functions benchmark and up to 15.3% better performance on the Simple Turing Concepts benchmark. Finally, symbol-tuned models show large improvements in following flipped-labels presented in-context, meaning that they are more capable of using in-context information to override prior knowledge.

EMNLP 2023

Symbol tuning improves in-context learning in language models

in-context learning

large language models

natural language processing

We present symbol tuning - finetuning language models on in-context input-label pairs where natural language labels (e.g., "positive/negative sentiment") are replaced with arbitrary symbols (e.g., "foo/bar"). Symbol tuning leverages the intuition that when a model cannot use instructions or natural language labels to figure out a task, it must instead do so by learning the input-label mappings.

We experiment with symbol tuning across PaLM models up to 540B parameters and observe benefits across various settings. First, symbol tuning boosts performance on unseen in-context learning tasks and is much more robust to underspecified prompts, such as those without instructions or without natural language labels. Second, symbol-tuned models are much stronger at algorithmic reasoning tasks, with up to 18.2% better performance on the List Functions benchmark and up to 15.3% better performance on the Simple Turing Concepts benchmark. Finally, symbol-tuned models show large improvements in following flipped-labels presented in-context, meaning that they are more capable of using in-context information to override prior knowledge.

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.

The field of text-to-image (T2I) generation has garnered significant attention both within the research community and among everyday users. Despite the advancements of T2I models, a common issue encountered by users is the need for repetitive editing of input prompts in order to receive a satisfactory image, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Given the demonstrated text generation power of large-scale language models, such as GPT-k, we investigate the potential of utilizing such models to improve the prompt editing process for T2I generation. We conduct a series of experiments to compare the common edits made by humans and GPT-k, evaluate the performance of GPT-k in prompting T2I, and examine factors that may influence this process. We found that GPT-k models focus more on inserting modifiers while humans tend to replace words and phrases, which includes changes to the subject matter. Experimental results show that GPT-k are more effective in adjusting modifiers rather than predicting spontaneous changes in the primary subject matters. Adopting the edit suggested by GPT-k models may reduce the percentage of remaining edits by 20-30%.

Collaborative Generative AI: Integrating GPT-k for Efficient Editing in Text-to-Image Generation

Recent work has aimed to capture nuances of human behavior by using LLMs to simulate responses from particular demographics in settings like social science experiments and public opinion surveys. However, there are currently no established ways to discuss or evaluate the quality of such LLM simulations. Moreover, there is growing concern that these LLM simulations are flattened caricatures of the personas that they aim to simulate, failing to capture the multidimensionality of people and perpetuating stereotypes. To bridge these gaps, we present CoMPosT, a framework to characterize LLM simulations using four dimensions: Context, Model, Persona, and Topic. We use this framework to measure open-ended LLM simulations’ susceptibility to caricature, defined via two criteria: individuation and exaggeration. We evaluate the level of caricature in scenarios from existing work on LLM simulations. We find that for GPT-4, simulations of certain demographics (political and marginalized groups) and topics (general, uncontroversial) are highly susceptible to caricature.

CoMPosT: Characterizing and Evaluating Caricature in LLM Simulations

We propose a method that ensembles $N$-best hypotheses to improve natural language generation. 
Previous studies have achieved notable improvements in generation quality by explicitly reranking $N$-best candidates. 
These studies assume that there exists a hypothesis of higher quality. 
We expand the assumption to be more practical as there exist \emph{partly} higher quality hypotheses in the $N$-best yet they may be imperfect as the entire sentences. 
By merging these high-quality fragments, we can obtain a higher-quality output than the single-best sentence. 
Specifically, we first obtain $N$-best hypotheses and conduct token-level quality estimation. 
We then apply tokens that should or should not be present in the final output as lexical constraints in decoding. 
Empirical experiments on paraphrase generation, summarisation, and constrained text generation confirm that our method outperforms the strong $N$-best reranking methods.

Self-Ensemble of N-best Generation Hypotheses by Lexically Constrained Decoding

We conduct an inquiry into the sociotechnical aspects of sentiment analysis (SA) by critically examining 189 peer-reviewed papers on their applications, models, and datasets. Our investigation stems from the recognition that SA has become an integral component of diverse sociotechnical systems, exerting influence on both social and technical users. By delving into sociological and technological literature on sentiment, we unveil distinct conceptualizations of this term in domains such as finance, government, and medicine. Our study exposes a lack of explicit definitions and frameworks for characterizing sentiment, resulting in potential challenges and biases. To tackle this issue, we propose an ethics sheet encompassing critical inquiries to guide practitioners in ensuring equitable utilization of SA. Our findings underscore the significance of adopting an interdisciplinary approach to defining sentiment in SA and offer a pragmatic solution for its implementation.

The Sentiment Problem: A Critical Survey towards Deconstructing Sentiment Analysis

A scientific claim typically begins with the formulation of a research question or hypothesis, which is a tentative statement or proposition about a phenomenon or relationship between variables. Within the realm of scientific claim verification, considerable research efforts have been dedicated to attention architectures and leveraging the text comprehension capabilities of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), yielding promising performances. However, these models overlook the causal structure information inherent in scientific claims, thereby failing to establish a comprehensive chain of causal inference. This paper delves into the exploration to highlight the crucial role of qualitative causal structure in characterizing and verifying scientific claims based on evidence. We organize the qualitative causal structure into a heterogeneous graph and propose a novel attention-based graph neural network model to facilitate causal reasoning across relevant causally-potent factors. Our experiments demonstrate that by solely utilizing the qualitative causal structure, the proposed model achieves comparable performance to PLM-based models. Furthermore, by incorporating semantic features, our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches comprehensively.

Characterizing and Verifying Scientific Claims: Qualitative Causal Structure is All You Need | VIDEO

Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to solve the problem of catastrophic forgetting when learning a sequence of newly emerging relations. Recent CRE studies have found that catastrophic forgetting arises from the model's lack of robustness against future analogous relations. To address the issue, we introduce rationale, i.e., the explanations of relation classification results generated by Large Language Models (LLM), into CRE task. Specifically, we design the multi-task rationale tuning strategy to help the model learn current relations robustly. We also conduct contrastive rationale replay to further distinguish analogous relations. Experimental results on two standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art CRE models.

Rationale-Enhanced Language Models are Better Continual Relation Learners

Large and sparse feed-forward layers (S-FFN) such as Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) have proven effective in scaling up Transformers model size for pretraining large language models. By only activating part of the FFN parameters conditioning on input, S-FFN improves generalization performance while keeping training and inference costs (in FLOPs) fixed. In this work, we analyzed two major design choices of S-FFN: the memory block (a.k.a. expert) size and the memory block selection method under a general conceptual framework of sparse neural memory. Using this unified framework, we compare several S-FFN architectures for language modeling and provide insights into their relative efficacy and efficiency. We found a simpler selection method — Avg-K that selects blocks through their mean aggregated hidden states, achieving lower perplexity in language model pretraining compared to existing MoE architectures including Switch Transformer (Fedus et al., 2021) and HashLayer (Roller et al., 2021).

Towards A Unified View of Sparse Feed-Forward Network in Pretraining Large Language Model | VIDEO

Event Causality Extraction (ECE) aims to extract the cause-effect event pairs from the given text, which requires the model to possess a strong reasoning ability to capture event causalities.
However, existing works have not adequately exploited the interactions between the cause and effect event that could provide crucial clues for causality reasoning.
To this end, we propose an Implicit Cause-Effect interaction (ICE) framework, which formulates ECE as a template-based conditional generation problem. The proposed method captures the implicit intra- and inter-event interactions by incorporating the privileged information (ground truth event types and arguments) for reasoning, and a knowledge distillation mechanism is introduced to alleviate the unavailability of privileged information in the test stage. 
Furthermore, to facilitate knowledge transfer from teacher to student, we design an event-level alignment strategy named Cause-Effect Optimal Transport (CEOT) to strengthen the semantic interactions of cause-effect event types and arguments. 
Experimental results indicate that ICE achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ECE-CCKS dataset.

Event Causality Extraction via Implicit Cause-Effect Interactions

Although Non-autoregressive Transformer (NAT) models have achieved great success in terms of fast inference speed, this speedup comes with a performance drop due to the inherent \emph{multi-modality} problem of the NAT model. Previous works commonly alleviate this problem by replacing the target side of the raw data with distilled data generated by Autoregressive Transformer (AT) models. However, the multi-modality problem in the distilled data is still significant and thus limits further improvement of the NAT models. In this paper, we propose a method called Sequence-Level Self-Distillation (SLSD), which aims to generate distilled data by the NAT model itself, eliminating the need for additional teacher networks. Furthermore, SLSD can adapt to different NAT models without precise adjustments since the self-distilled data is generated from the same types of NAT models. We conduct extensive experiments on WMT14 EN$\leftrightarrow$DE and WMT16 EN$\leftrightarrow$RO and choose four classic NAT models as the backbones to validate the generality and effectiveness of SLSD. The results show that our approach can consistently improve all models on both raw data and distilled data without sacrificing the inference speed.

Self-Improvement of Non-autoregressive Model via Sequence-Level Distillation

Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have led to promising zero-shot performance in discriminative natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. This involves querying the LLM using a prompt containing the question, and the candidate labels to choose from. The question-answering capabilities of ChatGPT arise from its pre-training on large amounts of human-written text, as well as its subsequent fine-tuning on human preferences, which motivates us to ask: Does ChatGPT also inherit humans' cognitive biases? In this paper, we study the primacy effect of ChatGPT: the tendency of selecting the labels at earlier positions as the answer. We have two main findings: i) ChatGPT's decision is sensitive to the order of labels in the prompt; ii) ChatGPT has a clearly higher chance to select the labels at earlier positions as the answer. We hope that our experiments and analyses provide additional insights into building more reliable ChatGPT-based solutions. We release the source code at https://github.com/wangywUST/PrimacyEffectGPT.

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Collaborative Generative AI: Integrating GPT-k for Efficient Editing in Text-to-Image Generation

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