Singapore

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&#39; 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&#39;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.

EMNLP 2023

Primacy Effect of ChatGPT

primacy effect

large language model

bias

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

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.

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.

Biomedical named entity recognition is one of the core tasks in biomedical natural language processing (BioNLP). To tackle this task, numerous supervised/distantly supervised approaches have been proposed. Despite their remarkable success, these approaches inescapably demand laborious human effort. To alleviate the need of human effort, dictionary-based approaches have been proposed to extract named entities simply based on a given dictionary. However, one downside of existing dictionary-based approaches is that they are challenged to identify concept synonyms that are not listed in the given dictionary, which we refer as the synonym generalization problem. 
In this study, we propose a novel Synonym Generalization (SynGen) framework that recognizes the biomedical concepts contained in the input text using span-based predictions. In particular, SynGen introduces two regularization terms, namely, (1) a synonym distance regularizer; and (2) a noise perturbation regularizer, to minimize the synonym generalization error. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we provide a theoretical analysis of the bound of synonym generalization error. We extensively evaluate our approach on a wide range of benchmarks and the results verify that SynGen outperforms previous dictionary-based models by notable margins. Lastly, we provide a detailed analysis to further reveal the merits and inner-workings of our approach.

Biomedical Named Entity Recognition via Dictionary-based Synonym Generalization | VIDEO

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is an important task in sentiment analysis, aiming to extract aspect-level opinions and sentiments from user-generated reviews. 
The fine-grained nature of ASTE incurs a high annotation cost, while the scarcity of annotated data limits the performance of existing methods.
This paper exploits data augmentation to address this issue.
Traditional augmentation methods typically modify the input sentences of existing samples via heuristic rules or language models, which have shown success in text classification tasks. 
However, applying these methods to fine-grained tasks like ASTE poses challenges in generating diverse augmented samples while maintaining alignment between modified sentences and origin labels.
Therefore, this paper proposes a target-to-source augmentation approach for ASTE.
Our approach focuses on learning a generator that can directly generate new sentences based on labels and syntactic templates. With this generator, we can generate a substantial number of diverse augmented samples by mixing labels and syntactic templates from different samples.
Besides, to ensure the quality of the generated sentence, we introduce fluency and alignment discriminators to provide feedback on the generated sentence and then use this feedback to optimize the generator via a reinforcement learning framework.
Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the performance of existing ASTE models.

Target-to-Source Augmentation for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Language model detoxification aims to minimize the risk of generating offensive or harmful content in pretrained language models (PLMs) for safer deployment. Existing methods can be roughly categorized as finetuning-based and decoding-based. However, the former is often resource-intensive, while the latter relies on additional components and potentially compromises the generation fluency. In this paper, we propose a more lightweight approach that enables the PLM itself to achieve ``self-detoxification''. Our method is built upon the observation that prepending a negative steering prompt can effectively induce PLMs to generate toxic content. At the same time, we are inspired by the recent research in the interpretability field, which formulates the evolving contextualized representations within the PLM as an information stream facilitated by the attention layers. Drawing on this idea, we devise a method to identify the toxification direction from the normal generation process to the one prompted with the negative prefix, and then steer the generation to the reversed direction by manipulating the information movement within the attention layers. Experimental results show that our approach, without any fine-tuning or extra components, can achieve comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods.

Self-Detoxifying Language Models via Toxification Reversal

Recent work has shown how to prompt large language models with explanations to obtain strong performance on textual reasoning tasks, i.e., the chain-of-thought paradigm. However, subtly different explanations can yield widely varying downstream task accuracy. Explanations that have not been "tuned" for a task, such as off-the-shelf explanations written by non-experts, may lead to mediocre performance. This paper tackles the problem of how to optimize explanation-infused prompts in a blackbox fashion. We first generate sets of candidate explanations for each example in the prompt using a leave-one-out scheme, then find an effective combination of these explanations with a two-stage framework. We first evaluate explanations for each in-context example in isolation according to two proxy metrics, log likelihood and accuracy on new examples. Then, we search over combinations of explanations to find one that yields high performance against a silver-labeled development set. Across four textual reasoning tasks spanning question answering, mathematical reasoning, and natural language inference, results show that our proxy metrics correlate with ground truth accuracy and our overall method can effectively improve prompts over crowdworker annotations and naive search strategies

Explanation Selection Using Unlabeled Data for Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Open-world Relation Extraction (OpenRE) has recently garnered significant attention. However, existing approaches tend to oversimplify the problem by assuming that all instances of unlabeled data belong to novel classes, thereby limiting the practicality of these methods. We argue that the OpenRE setting should be more aligned with the characteristics of real-world data. Specifically, we propose two key improvements: (a) unlabeled data should encompass known and novel classes, including negative instances; and (b) the set of novel classes should represent long-tail relation types. Furthermore, we observe that popular relations can often be implicitly inferred through specific patterns, while long-tail relations tend to be explicitly expressed. Motivated by these insights, we present a method called KNoRD (Known and Novel Relation Discovery), which effectively classifies explicitly and implicitly expressed relations from known and novel classes within unlabeled data. Experimental evaluations on several Open-world RE benchmarks demonstrate that KNoRD consistently outperforms other existing methods, achieving significant performance gains.

Open-world Semi-supervised Generalized Relation Discovery Aligned in a Real-world Setting | VIDEO

With the recent appearance of LLMs in practical settings, having methods that can effectively detect factual inconsistencies is crucial to reduce the propagation of misinformation and improve trust in model outputs.
When testing on existing factual consistency benchmarks, we find that a few large language models (LLMs) perform competitively on classification benchmarks for factual inconsistency detection compared to traditional non-LLM methods. However, a closer analysis reveals issues with existing evaluation benchmarks, affecting evaluation precision.
To address this, we propose a new protocol for inconsistency detection benchmark creation and implement it in a 10-domain benchmark called SummEdits. This new benchmark is 20 times more cost-effective per sample than previous benchmarks and highly reproducible, as we estimate inter-annotator agreement at about 0.9.
Most LLMs struggle on SummEdits, with performance close to random chance. The best-performing model, GPT-4, is still 8% below estimated human performance, highlighting the gaps in LLMs' ability to reason about facts and detect inconsistencies when they occur.

SummEdits: Measuring LLM Ability at Factual Reasoning Through The Lens of Summarization | VIDEO

Existing multimodal machine translation (MMT) datasets consist of images and video captions or instructional video subtitles, which rarely contain linguistic ambiguity, making visual information ineffective in generating appropriate translations. Recent work has constructed an ambiguous subtitles dataset to alleviate this problem but is still limited to the problem that videos do not necessarily contribute to disambiguation.

We introduce EVA (Extensive training set and Video-helpful evaluation set for Ambiguous subtitles translation), an MMT dataset containing 852k Japanese-English parallel subtitle pairs, 520k Chinese-English parallel subtitle pairs, and corresponding video clips collected from movies and TV episodes. In addition to the extensive training set, EVA contains a video-helpful evaluation set in which subtitles are ambiguous, and videos are guaranteed helpful for disambiguation.

Furthermore, we propose SAFA, an MMT model based on the Selective Attention model with two novel methods: Frame attention loss and Ambiguity augmentation, aiming to use videos in EVA for disambiguation fully. Experiments on EVA show that visual information and the proposed methods can boost translation performance, and our model performs significantly better than existing MMT models.

Video-Helpful Multimodal Machine Translation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many formal language oriented tasks, such as structural data-to-text and semantic parsing.
However current benchmarks mostly follow the data distribution of the pre-training data of LLMs.
Therefore, a natural question rises that do LLMs really understand the structured semantics of formal languages.
In this paper, we investigate this problem on a special case, converse binary relation.
We introduce a new benchmark ConvRe focusing on converse relations, which contains 17 relations and 1240 triples extracted from popular knowledge graph completion datasets.
Our ConvRE features two tasks, Re2Text and Text2Re, which are formulated as multi-choice question answering to evaluate LLMs' ability to determine the matching between relations and associated text.
For the evaluation protocol, apart from different prompting methods, we further introduce variants to the test text and few-shot example text. 
We conduct experiments on three popular LLM families and have observed various scaling trends. 
The results suggest that LLMs
often resort to shortcut learning and still face challenges on our proposed benchmark.

An Investigation of LLMs’ Inefficacy in Understanding Converse Relations

Large language models (LLMs), e.g., ChatGPT, have revolutionized the domain of natural language processing because of their excellent performance on various tasks. Despite their great potential, LLMs also incur serious concerns as they are likely to be misused. There are already reported cases of academic cheating by using LLMs. Thus, it is a pressing problem to identify LLM-generated texts. In this work, we design a zero-shot black-box method for detecting LLM-generated texts. The key idea is to revise the text to be detected using the ChatGPT model. Our method is based on the intuition that the ChatGPT model will make fewer revisions to LLM-generated texts than it does to human-written texts, because the texts generated by LLMs are more in accord with the generation logic and statistical patterns learned by LLMs like ChatGPT. Thus, if the text to be detected and its ChatGPT-revised version have a higher degree of similarity, the text is more likely to be LLM-generated. Extensive experiments on various datasets and tasks show that our method can effectively detect LLM-generated texts. Moreover, compared with other detection methods, our method has better generalization ability and is more stable across various datasets. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/LLM-generated-text-detection.

Beat LLMs at Their Own Game: Zero-Shot LLM-Generated Text Detection via Querying ChatGPT

The task of Question Generation over Knowledge Bases (KBQG) aims to convert a logical form into a natural language question. For
the sake of expensive cost of large-scale question annotation, the methods of KBQG under low-resource scenarios urgently need to be developed. However, current methods heavily rely on annotated data for fine-tuning, which is not well-suited for few-shot question generation. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown their impressive generalization ability in few-shot tasks. Inspired by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, which is an in-context learning strategy for reasoning, we formulate KBQG task as a reasoning problem, where the generation of a complete question is splitted into a series of sub-question generation. Our proposed prompting method KQG-CoT first retrieves supportive logical forms from the unlabeled data pool taking account of the characteristics of the logical form. Then, we write a prompt to explicit the reasoning chain of generating complicated questions based on the selected demonstrations. To further ensure prompt quality, we extend KQG-CoT into KQG-CoT+ via sorting the logical forms by their complexity. We conduct extensive experiments over three public KBQG datasets. The results demonstrate that our prompting method consistently outperforms other prompting baselines on the evaluated datasets. Remarkably, our KQG-CoT+ method could surpass existing few-shot SoTA results of the PathQuestions dataset by 18.25, 10.72, and 10.18 absolute points on BLEU-4, METEOR, and ROUGE-L, respectively.

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Biomedical Named Entity Recognition via Dictionary-based Synonym Generalization | VIDEO

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